


A Presence of Departed Acts

by Pugglemuggle



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: (implied) - Freeform, Big Bang Challenge, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Flashbacks, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Memory Loss, Past Peggy Carter/Angie Martinelli, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Recovery, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-29
Updated: 2016-08-29
Packaged: 2018-08-11 12:03:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7891396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pugglemuggle/pseuds/Pugglemuggle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first pages of the notebook are barely legible. The lines overlap, slide down the page, mesh together in crooked Cyrillic characters and clumsy, frantic English that seem to switch off every other sentence. They are the incoherent, fragmented memories of a madman. The words spill onto the paper and mark it like a stain. </p><p>The next pages are a little easier. The Cyrillic dies away and the lines seem to untangle themselves until slowly, his story begins to make sense.</p><p>Or, Bucky pulls Steve from the Potomac, finds Peggy Carter, and, finally, starts to find himself. This is the tale of Bucky Barnes in Washington D.C. before he escapes to Romania, told through a combination of narrative prose and excerpts from Bucky’s notebook. Written for the 2016 Stucky Big Bang.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I could never have done this without my helpful artists! Here are the pieces they created to compliment this work:
> 
> [Opening Scene](http://dcrkbucky.tumblr.com/post/149582609728/he-does-remember-jumping-into-the-potomac-he) by [dcrkbucky](http://dcrkbucky.tumblr.com/)  
> [Radiator Scene](http://keatsish.tumblr.com/post/149609317887/used-to-sit-side-by-side-next-to-the-radiator-with) by [keatsish](http://keatsish.tumblr.com/)  
> [Notebook Entry](http://keatsish.tumblr.com/post/149609748132/you-he-writes-without-thinking-then-lifts-his) by [keatsish](http://keatsish.tumblr.com/)  
> [Notebook Page](http://chocyofsparta.tumblr.com/post/149595507711/this-is-my-artwork-for-the-stucky-big) by [chocyofsparta](http://chocyofsparta.tumblr.com/)
> 
> In addition, I'd love to give out a HUGE thank you to all the people who helped me beta read this fic. You know who you are. I am notoriously awful at spotting typos and I truly, truly appreciate your help.
> 
> Feel free to check out the other fics written for the 2016 Stucky Big Bang by checking out the AO3 collection of by visiting [The Stucky Library](http://thestuckylibrary.tumblr.com).
> 
> I first got the idea for this fic when Sebastian Stan posted that thing on Instagram just before Civil War came out. You know the post I'm talking about—the one that broke all our collective hearts and made us feel even more distraught over Bucky Barnes than we already did. Sebastian essentially said that the reason Bucky carries his backpack with him is because it's got notebooks with memories written down in them, and they're his most precious possessions. Hence, this fic was born. You can read what Sebstan had to say in [this article](http://www.dailydot.com/parsec/captain-america-civil-war-bucky-barnes-backpack-sebastian-stan-answer/).
> 
> The title is from "Remorse — is Memory — awake" by Emily Dickinson, copied below for your reading pleasure. This poem is so Bucky Barnes it's a little scary.
>
>>   
>  _Remorse — is Memory — awake —_   
>  _Her Parties all astir —_   
>  _A Presence of Departed Acts —_   
>  _At window — and at Door —_
>> 
>>  
>> 
>> _Its Past — set down before the Soul_  
>  _And lighted with a Match —_  
>  _Perusal — to facilitate —_  
>  _And help Belief to stretch —_
>> 
>>  
>> 
>> _Remorse is cureless — the Disease_  
>  _Not even God — can heal —_  
>  _For 'tis His institution — and_  
>  _The Adequate of Hell_  
> 

He remembers this:

Grasping the steel beam with his left hand, metal on metal, one and the same. His grip is leaving dents in the steel, finger-shaped dips that mark his victory. The metal screams as his weight bends and twists and warps it.

Hard to breathe, thin atmosphere. Air is scarce here, most of it filled with ash or consumed by the fire. The helicarrier is falling. Losing altitude. He estimates three minutes. Soon the water will deprive them of air altogether.

And _him_ , his arms outstretched, as though reaching out for his hand, his flesh hand. His eyes closed, blood turning his lips, his cheeks, his abdomen red-burgundy. In memory time flows slower. In memory he seems almost suspended in air, drifting, not plummeting into the dark abyss of river below.

He remembers how he felt, seeing that man fall. It was like he was burning from the inside out, his muscles tense, his blood wild and feral, like his very cells were trying to reach forward and catch the falling man. He remembers that feeling making him lift each metal finger, one by one, his grip slipping, slipping, slipping until he drops from the steel beam and into the open air, hurtling down after.

—

He doesn’t know how he got here.

Suddenly he’s driving a car (2005 Toyota Corolla, silver, wires and electrical paneling exposed below the dashboard, indicating hotwiring). It’s night. He is on a freeway going 90 miles per hour and he doesn’t remember getting into this car, doesn’t remember stealing it, doesn’t remember why he’s sopping wet from head to foot. The radio is on but all that comes out is static and rain is hammering at the windshield and his headlights are turned off and his mouth tastes like iron and his hands are shaking around the wheel and—

He pulls over to the side of the road, the brakes screeching in protest as he decelerates from 90 to 0 in a matter of seconds. He steps out into the rain, shuts the car door. Breathes.

He does remember jumping into the Potomac. He remembers how the water felt like concrete, then like ice, and then nothing, just dull numbness. He remembers pulling the man up to the surface and dragging him to the shore.

He thinks he saved the man’s life. He doesn’t know why.

After that his memory is blank. He figures he must have stolen this car somewhere close to the Arlington shoreline, because when he walks around the front of the car to lean on the hood, he sees that the Corolla has a Virginia license plate. If he looks back, he can see the light pollution from the city creating a dim haze over the horizon, like a midnight sunset. He can’t be that far—but then again, he can't be sure that Washington is the city he’s looking at. The clock on the car’s dashboard reads 1:22 A.M. Assuming he maintained a speed of 90 miles per hour and he fell into the Potomac at around 5:00 in the afternoon, he could be anywhere between 10 and 700 miles away.

No, wrong. He would have waited until dark to start moving. Any movement in the city would have been dangerous but escaping in broad daylight would have been nigh impossible so soon after a failed mission. He must have waited until at least 9:00, maybe 10:00. That puts him up to 400 miles away, provided he took no detours. Anywhere on the east coast.

He gets back in the car and keeps driving until he passes a road sign: Fairfax and Vienna, ½ mile. He’s still in Virginia, not even 20 miles west of the capital. He hasn’t gotten too far, then. He wonders what he did between falling in the river and now, if he wasn’t driving.

He takes the nearest exit and drives the car off the road and into the trees, rolling over underbrush until he can’t see the road anymore. Then he pries license plates off and rips them in half like they're paper. It’s easy—effortless, even. He buries a few of the pieces and puts the rest down a storm drain.

He doesn’t know where he was trying to go. His emergency pickup location is in Washington. The nearest hideout to Washington is in Norfolk, Virginia—a coastal city—and the nearest base, aside from the capital itself, is Philadelphia. Inland Virginia is not on Hydra’s map. He has no reason to be here. It’s poor strategy.

He has no way of contacting his handlers. Most communication systems are too easily traceable. They usually track him with a chip in his metal arm, but when he looks, the plates have been pulled away to reveal a torn section of wires where the chip had been forcefully removed. Did he remove the chip himself? He doesn’t remember.

He’ll have to stay here. He’ll return to the rendezvous point in Washington in a few days’ time, once traveling is safer. The best course of action is to disappear where he is.

It’s nearly daybreak when he finds the house he needs at the furthest end of a cul-de-sac. He’s wet from the rain as well as the Potomac. He’s seen two people on his way to this neighborhood and neither of them saw him, but he can’t afford to remain exposed for much longer.

There is a single car parked in the driveway of the house—a white sedan with underpressured tires and plant debris littering the roof and windshield. It hasn’t been driven in some time. Three months, he guesses. The lawn is freshly mowed, but he finds no grass clippings in their yard waste bin. A lawn mowing service then, or a neighbor. He steals around the side of the house to the shed and picks the lock silently, checks for a lawn mower just to be safe. Nothing in the shed looks like it’s been touched for years. A layer of dust covers every surface.

He would profile this house as the residence of an older couple between the ages of 60 and 65. They live here alone during most of the year but leave during the warmer months to live in their summer home elsewhere. They have no pets, and their children and grandchildren live in cities more than three hours away by car.

There’s a small sign in front of the house indicating the protection of a particular security system. He pays it little attention. He walks to the side of the house and climbs the porch railing to get to a second-floor window and pries it open with his metal hand. Once inside, he closes the window, goes downstairs, and disables the security panel easily.

He sweeps the house once, a knife in hand. It’s empty, like he expected. He doesn’t know what he would have done if he’d been wrong, if he’d found someone sleeping in one of the beds. Is the knife he’s holding for self-defense, or is it offensive? Would he have slit their throats if they’d been here? He doesn’t know. The not knowing makes his chest seize and he’s thinking too much and he shoves it down, away. Quiet. No thought. Nothing but the dark.

He takes inventory. The house is equipped with enough non-perishables to last him several weeks, though he doesn’t intend to stay that long. Every window on the bottom floor has curtains, so he should be able to move with relative ease around the house without attracting the attention of the neighbors, provided he keeps the lights off.

He lies on the couch and sleeps for half an hour before he jolts awake, pointing his knife at empty air. He doesn’t sleep again that night.

—

The house is uncomfortable. He feels trapped. He paces, he eats little, and he sleeps little. For three days, he hides here, restless. Now that he has nothing to do his mind starts spinning again, spinning, spinning, pulling out thoughts that make him roil even faster, unscrew a little quicker.  He feels like a train off the rails.

This always happens after missions, but it’s worse this time. This time he thinks about _him_ , that man, about who he said he was, about how it felt to hurt him, and he suddenly feels sick to his stomach without knowing why. He doesn’t remember ever having been left alone for more than a day after a mission. Now it’s been three.

He loses two hours in the middle of the third day. One moment he’s taking a black backpack from the closet of the master bedroom and the next he’s crouched over a toilet, vomiting. His eyes are watering and his mouth and throat burn from the acid. He doesn’t remember walking into the bathroom. He feels weak and feverish.

After ten minutes the frantic pace of his pulse still hasn’t slowed. He’s hyperventilating. He’s sweating. He wants to run.

He realizes that what he is feeling is panic.

He doesn’t remember ever having had a panic attack, but he thinks he must have, because he knows that if he starts counting _(1.... 2.... 3...._ _4....)_ and if he can get ahold of his breathing _(in.... out.... in.... out.... Breathe, soldier, breathe....)_ then it will start to die down. For a moment, he swears he can taste Italian gunpowder on his lips and feel the weight of his steel helmet pressing against his skull. He exhales. Then, explosively and without warning, the bathroom is gone and the man from the helicarrier is _there,_ almost real enough to touch—him _,_ his face, small, everything small, his hands, long fingers, rough, sketching on a page, sketching a boy with dark hair and bright eyes and a wide toothy grin and he looks up and says, “Looks more like you than the last one, eh Buck?” and he’s _smiling_ and he feels his own lips stretch back to mirror it because if Steve smiles you can bet your ass he’s smiling too.

And that’s his name, isn’t it, the man’s name: Steve. That’s what they told him. Captain Steven Rogers, Threat Level 6, 190 centimeters tall and 110 kilograms, prefers close-quarters combat. Long-range dispatch recommended, if possible. Dead in 10 hours.

Only the Steve they told him to kill looks nothing like the one in his head. The Steve he fought on the bridge and in the helicarrier is bigger and taller, a little harder around the edges. Still, the thought of killing him makes his stomach lurch, and the panic sharpens again in the back of his mind.

He doesn’t want to kill Steve, he thinks.

And he doesn’t want to think about what that might mean.

—

By the fourth day in the house, he’s restless and sleepless enough to turn on the television. It’s a mistake.

Footage from Washington is still all over the news. There are clean-up crews all over the Potomac, trying to pull out the bodies and the wreckage. Although the helicarriers themselves were unmanned, the falling wreckage caused a number of civilian casualties. That, combined with the massacre inside SHIELD headquarters left behind a large death toll. Many of the dead are people he killed directly. The news station doesn’t show any of the bodies on air—it would be too much for their sensitive viewers—but he knows what the bodies must look like: shot, crushed, burned, bloated. He’s seen corpses like this before but he can’t remember where.

He wonders how many of the casualties were his. Fifteen? Twenty? He can’t be sure.

He turns off the TV.

It would be simpler, to block this out, to ignore it. He imagines what it might be like—let the frost back in like nothing ever happened. Everything is clearer, sharper on a cold day. It would all be so easy. Feeling is always harder.

So much harder.

Harder, but he thinks the choice has already been made for him. Nothing has been the same since the Potomac. He feels like he left the water with new skin, and he can’t go back, no matter how much he might want to. Maybe it isn’t a choice. Hindsight can make the impossible seem easy, can’t it?

His chest feels filled with black tar, the thick pitch adhering its sticky dark fingertips to his heart and tugging downwards until it feels like his lungs, his stomach, his ribs are being dragged down, down, down through the floor. He’s choking on it. The feeling is as familiar as breathing but he doesn’t remember having felt it before. Guilt, he thinks vaguely.

It’s too much. He retreats into himself. He watches rather than feels his shaking hands begin to still, the rise and fall of his chest start to slow. He’s numb. He feels the ghost of a feeling rather than the feeling itself.

He gets to his feet. He goes to the kitchen. He finds a dish cloth. He wipes down every surface, erasing the fingerprints that betray his presence around the house. He clears the house of hair, trash, and empty food cans. He cleans the bathroom. He returns every item to its original position.

He waits for dark.

At 10:25 P.M., he vacates the house. He takes with him only a sturdy black backpack, a few cans of food, a bottle of water, his knife, a baseball cap, an extra change of street clothes, and the uniform he wore on his way in. He walks half a mile down the street, then breaks into a 90s sedan and hotwires the engine.

The freeway he gets on is one that leads more or less directly to Washington D.C. It’s the worst place he could possibly go right now, but also the only place. For a moment, he wonders if he’s going there with the intention of being caught.

He doesn’t think so. He can feel adrenaline tingle at his fingertips, his mind whirring with half-formed plans and strategies. His survival instincts are too strong for him to forfeit himself. In that regard he is selfish enough to survive.

He’ll find the Hydra rendezvous point and let his handlers take it from there. Or at least, that's what he tells himself.

—

He gets as close to the city as he can in the car without passing by any camera-enforced intersections. Even with the baseball cap pulled low over his face, and even with his careful attention to driving laws, he won’t take any chances. He’s sure the cameras are easily tapped. He’ll never underestimate Hydra’s or SHIELD’s ability to find someone who doesn’t want to be found.

He parks the car on the street and abandons it with the keys in the engine. The rendezvous is a half mile away. It’s on the western edge of the city. He walks north with his head down, but every step feels _wrong_ , every block closer makes him more agitated. It’s so much easier in theory, so much harder now that he’s here. He should keep going—he was never supposed to think this much, to feel this much. He should let them wipe him. He should, but.... But.

He’s standing at the corner of an intersection. It’s almost midnight and the streets here are nearly empty. A few cars pass in front of him as he waits at the street corner, ready to step off the pavement, and he’s about to cross, but then a bus rolls by, and—

It’s his face on the side of the bus. Steve’s face.

The bus is moving too quickly for him to stare, but the flash he gets is enough. Steve, in his World War II uniform, carrying his shield and wearing a stoic expression that makes him look so much older than 23. The text behind him reads “Captain America: The Man and Legend. On Exhibit Now.” And there’s a logo at the bottom, a yellow sun inside a blue circle. “The Smithsonian Institute,” it says.

The Smithsonian. The museum at the heart of the capital. One of the most trafficked locations in the city.

He doesn’t cross the street. He turns right—east—instead.

—

He shouldn’t walk through the whole city on the street. Walking several blocks through the outskirts of this city is one thing—traipsing through the historical district is another thing entirely. He could steal another car. It’s not a bad option. But it does mean going through more security cameras, more intersections. Also it involves the risk of stealing the car in the first place.

He could try using public transportation—a bus, or the metro. They have more security cameras and would also cost money. A taxi would cost money, too, but it wouldn’t mean dealing with security cameras. If he sat in the back seat, he’d be less visible to the cameras in photo-enforced intersections. The driver might see his face, but there would be no reason for the driver to remember him.

He should have looked for cash when he left the house, he realizes. An older couple would be likely to have a safe with some emergency money on hand. Considering their supply of canned food, it seemed like they were the type to be prepared for the worst.

But he doesn’t have cash, and there aren’t enough people out for him to pickpocket without being noticed, so walking is his best option. It’s going to take him at least an hour, maybe two, depending on how careful he is. He’ll take back alleys and avoid main roads.

At least it’s still dark.

—

It’s mid-morning when he steals into the museum through the emergency exit. It’s a weekday. The room he enters is not empty—a group of school-aged children is filing through the room’s main entrance, while an older couple stands by the side admiring the Ice Age fossils on display there. None of them notice him enter, he thinks, but an older woman does look at him as he passes, her expression bored, maybe—or is it suspicious? She doesn’t look at him for very long, but there’s a moment when their eyes meet, and he feels his blood freeze in his veins. _(Her neck is exposed. She’s small—5’4”, thin, weak. Only two feet away. He could reach out with his hand, his metal hand, and she wouldn’t stand a chance—)_

He leaves the room as quickly as he can without drawing attention to himself.

The Smithsonian is a large museum. It feels like every room he walks into is a new corner of the maze he hasn’t seen before. He’s sure there must be an order to it all, some sort of timeline perhaps, but he can’t understand it. It seems like he’s passing from a Cold War propaganda display to a Great Depression exhibit to a series of uniforms from the US Army. It’s disorienting. He feels as though he’s stuck in a loop.

He has no idea whether he’s getting closer or farther away from the exhibit he’s here to see.  He talks to no one, touches no one, makes eye contact with no one. He’s leaving an exhibit about explorations of the arctic when he catches a glimpse of a face on a poster in the next exhibit and stops, stands still in the middle of the walkway. He knew he would see that face here, he knew it, but he isn’t prepared. He sees the strong jaw, blond hair, blue eyes, and it’s like before with the bus, only worse, and suddenly he’s, he’s—

He’s sixteen. His clothes are sopping wet, soaked through and heavy. He’s running. Behind him, a man is giving chase, and the thrill of it streaks through his veins, adrenaline sharpening the ice of the rain, the smell of the city, the lines of the sidewalk and street. And Steve, of course. Steve is running beside him and he shouldn’t be, Bucky should stop him, he _should_ , but he’s stupid and the man behind them isn’t running after them just for fun, so they keep going for another block until they’ve turned a corner and run out of sight. He yanks Steve next to him in an alley next to a dumpster. Waits for a moment. Breathes.

“I think… I think we…” Steve pants, his gasps high and thin as he leans over with his hands on his knees. Bucky feels a pang of guilt. Steve’s asthma is acting up, he’s soaking wet, he’s going to get sick, Steve’s ma is never going to forgive him. It’s his fault. But then Steve looks up at him and he’s _grinning_ , wide and gleeful, and Bucky forgets, for a moment. “I think we lost him.”

“I hope so,” Bucky says, glancing back out of the alley to check down the street. “That trolley driver was a real hard-ass, huh?”

“Well, I don’t blame him. We didn’t pay,” Steve replies.

“It’s just a couple nickels.”

“Yeah,” says Steve, “a couple nickels we didn’t pay.”

“I wouldn’t run that far for a couple nickels. That’s why I wanted to take the trolley.”

And then they’re laughing, and he’s not really sure why. It starts out as giggling they can’t quite stop, and then it keeps going, and going, until they’re laughing loud and hard and Bucky’s doubled over and Steve’s asthma is coming back— _again_ —and Bucky feels guilty— _again_ —but somehow, the sound of Steve laughing makes it all seem okay. How can it be all bad when he gets to hear this?

But then the laughter is too high, too light and it’s wrong, out of place, so he turns around and there’s a kid giggling in its mother’s arms as she stands next to the remains of a rusted anchor used on some arctic expedition a hundred years ago. For a moment he doesn’t remember where he is. The tension builds in his muscles and for a terrifying moment, he’s afraid he’s going to lunge at the young mother.

Instead he wanders into the Steve Rogers exhibit. He finds the beginning and starts to read.

—

He never did understand why the Steve he remembers is so much smaller than the one he fought a few days ago, but he supposes this explains it. It’s the answer to a question he never managed to ask. He looks at the photographs, reads the placards, and it feels like reading a book you think you might have read years ago, but you don’t remember it well enough to be sure. Some parts are just barely familiar enough to make you start to wonder, and then the next chapter makes you question yourself again. You never can remember what happens next, though you think you know how it ends.

He reads everything, carefully and meticulously. He memorizes the words. He commits each picture to memory.

But he didn’t expect to see himself here.

When he looks at the next installation and sees his own face staring back, it feels like an intrusion, almost. It's a surreal and unwelcome reminder of things left for later days. He came here to see Steve—everyone came here to see Steve—and the face of the man staring back at him has no place here. The image of himself here, black and white and gray, makes him feel dizzy and sick. He reads every word because he feels compelled to, like he doesn’t have a choice, and he resents it.

Bucky Barnes, Bucky Barnes, Bucky Barnes, who is that, really? Just a name, a name on the wall. Perhaps the museum is right—maybe Bucky Barnes really did die in 1945. He’s just a ghost of a thing, a shell.

“Bucky Barnes was a pretty interesting guy,” says a voice to his left, and there’s no mistaking that the words are directed at him. His heart races. He doesn’t bolt, but it’s a near thing. He can’t hide his flinch.

The woman who spoke to him doesn’t seem to notice. She’s blonde, her hair tied back in a professional bun. Her blouse and skirt are business casual, unlike the shorts and t-shirts worn by most of the tourists. An ID badge hangs around her neck on a violet lanyard— _Beth Roswell, Curator Consultant_.

“He was a great sniper,” the woman continues. “He set records for an M1941 Johnson rifle, if you’re into that sort of stuff.”

He’s silent for a moment, but it’s apparent that he’s supposed to reply. He clears his throat. “Uh, no. Not really,” he croaks. It occurs to him that this is the first time he’s spoken in several days. “I don’t know guns.” It’s a lie—he can feel the weight of the M1941 in his hands as she says the words, can remember the kickback. Killing is harder to forget than other things, he supposes.

“Well,” the woman says, “we have several of Rogers’ art pieces on display on the left through there, if that’s more your thing.”

“Art?” He asks the question before he thinks, before he remembers he doesn’t want to talk to her. He can't help himself.

“I know—it surprises a lot of people. He was quite the artist before the war. Most of his works are portraits of people he knew. Barnes was a frequent subject.”

The hand, the pencil, the lines of the page. He finds himself looking in the direction she mentioned. “I’ll take a look,” he says. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” she says. Then she gives him a look, like she’s seeing something else when she looks at his face.

He leaves her before she can realize where she's seen his face before.

—

An artist always leaves something of himself behind in the pieces he creates—at least that’s what they say. He thinks it might be true, because even though Steve never draws himself, he’s here, in every single one of these sketches. He thinks he’s on the cusp of getting closer to something with each one he sees, but he’s not sure what it is he’s getting closer to.

They’re all self-portraits, whether Steve intended them to be or not. They’re the most selfless self-portraits ever to be drawn. It feels fitting, somehow. If the narrative presented by the exhibit is anything to go by, Steve’s whole life revolves around other people. And everything worth mentioning about Bucky Barnes always revolved around Steve. The moment he forms the thought, puts it into words, he knows it’s true.

There’s one sketch near the end, a portrait of Bucky and a woman with full lips and dark hair. Her name is Peggy Carter and she used to carry a flask of gin inside her boot. He knows because she let him take a swig once, when Steve was in the medical tent with two bullets in his thigh.

There’s something important about this picture, something he can’t articulate. It’s perhaps the most telling self-portrait of them all.

He moves on. He sees her again in the short documentary they play on repeat at one corner of the exhibit. Peggy Carter, age 96. She lives in a nursing home now, the video says. Forest Hills Residence Center, 901 1st Street Northwest. Just 30 minutes north of the museum. Washington D.C.

Is he really going to stay here, in the capital?

(Yes. He makes his own choices now. Even the bad ones.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I definitely included a shameless cameo from one of my "OCs", Beth Roswell, who stars in [Captain Steve Rogers: A History Through Art](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5181992). It's one of those stories I'm having a hard time leaving alone, apparently. If you'd like to see the artwork Bucky looks at in the museum, please feel free to check the notes at the beginning of that fic for the art post links. The art is embedded within the fic, if you'd rather.


	2. Chapter 2

A retirement home is easier to break into than a museum. It doesn’t have the same security protocols as a hospital either, and it frequently sees outside visitors. He follows the Forest Hills Residence Center building all the way around to the back, to the loading bay. There’s a Sysco truck parked in the driveway just before a large half-open garage door. A delivery woman is leaning against the side of the truck, a clipboard in hand, making periodic marks on a sheet of paper. He slips by her easily and makes his way through the storage rooms, through the kitchen, and into the busy cafeteria.

It’s by pure luck that he manages to find Peggy’s room.

It’s a smaller nursing home than he expected, but there are still well over a hundred rooms. It would take him too long to search every one, and he can’t ask around without raising suspicion. Peggy Carter is a historical figure. There is bound to be some kind of security protocol put in place here to protect her.

He decides to start by mapping the building. The cafeteria where he came in seems to be somewhere near the center of the building, with three hallways at three different sides of the room leading off towards what look like residential living areas. He walks through the cafeteria tables of the home’s elderly residents, who don’t pay him any mind as they continue to eat their meals. He picks a hallway at random—the one extending out to the left.

It’s quiet, he thinks, for midday. He doesn’t pass anyone in the hallway, only hears the vague murmur of voices from the cafeteria behind him. It’s both eerie and a relief.

The halls are covered with a pale yellow floral wallpaper and are dotted periodically with old paintings and framed photographs. There are doors on either side, like a hotel. The residents’ names are written on placards next to the doors in elegant cursive print: _Philip B. Jones, Eleanor F. White, Georgia J. Lewis._ Potted plants hang on hooks on some doors, while others have small side tables holding vases of flowers. It feels familiar, almost. Like he’s been here before in a dream.

Eventually the hallway forks at the end into two more hallways with windows all along the south side, facing out into a narrow central courtyard. It’s just after noon, and the sun is reaching its peak over the open space. He can see clearly all the way across the courtyard and through the windows in the hallway at the other side, to the partially open door directly in his line of sight. A nurse walks out through the door, carrying an empty cart. She opens the door wider to allow the full breadth of the cart and just over her shoulder he sees her, lying in the small cot, an IV attached to her arm. He knows it’s her. Even with the age on her face and the grey in her hair he remembers her.

Peggy is standing beside him under German sunlight in late August. It’s 1944. They’re in a forest, large deciduous trees rising up on either side of them, their green leaves not yet ready to turn. Clear ahead of them about 50 yards away there’s a line of silver ration cans sitting on a rock.

There’s a gun in his hand, his M1941. He’s holding it carefully, looking through the scope and aiming at the leftmost can. He pulls the trigger and his bullet rips through the center of the tin.

“See, if I’d been on the ground," he tells her, "I coulda done the same at 800 yards.” She raises an eyebrow.

“Try this one,” she says, pulling out her own revolver and holding it out to him. It’s small and almost weightless in his hand, the barrel only six or seven inches long. “It’s light, portable, easily concealed. Perfect for undercover operations.”

He takes aim at another can and fires. The gun kicks back and the bullet goes wide, careening off into the forest to their right.

“Pardon my French, ma'am,” Bucky says, handing her the gun again, “but the aim on this gun is shit. You should get your money back.”

“I suppose it is a hard gun to tame,” she says, taking aim now herself. “The power and speed of the shot are much greater than what you would find in most revolvers of its size and length, which sacrifices ease of accuracy.” Then she fires three shots in quick succession, one at each of the remaining cans, the crack of each round echoing out through the trees. The bullets hit their marks with deadly precision.

“However, it’s not incapable of accuracy. It just takes more practice.” She stows the gun away in a holster at her hip. The look on her face is calm, except for the way that her lips are turned up at the corners, just slightly, and he’s trying to decide if it can be considered a smirk when she turns on her heel and leaves him at the makeshift shooting range, her feet treading silently on the dirt back to the camp.

There’s a part of him that doesn’t want to like her, but she’s not making it easy. Peggy Carter is a hard person not to like.

In the nursing home, he’s followed the hall around the courtyard and is standing a few feet down from the room that belongs to Peggy Carter. The door is still slightly ajar. The nurse he saw before has since taken her cart down the hall away from where he’s standing, and the building is quiet.

He goes to the room and pushes open the door.

Peggy Carter rests in the bed, several pillows allowing her to sit slightly upright. She wears a white nightgown and her gray hair is damp, as though she’s just come out of a shower. There’s a book in her hands.

He hovers at the threshold, unsure how to announce himself. He realizes too late that she might call for help, when she sees him. He’s not sure if it would be better or worse if she doesn’t recognize him. He doesn’t get much more time to think about it, though, because Peggy looks up from her book and smiles at him.

“Can I help you?” she asks. He blinks. Says nothing.

“Would you like to come in?” she continues. “There’s a seat over there next to the desk, but I’m afraid you’ll have to get it yourself—I’m somewhat bedridden these days.”

He enters the room and walks to her bedside almost mechanically, but he doesn’t move the chair. He stands awkwardly a few feet away from her bed, his hands in his pockets.

“Hello,” he says finally, his voice rough.

Peggy rewards him with an amused smile. “Yes, hello,” she replies. “You’re not the loquacious type, are you?”

He shakes his head. She hasn’t asked for his name, he realizes, but she hasn't said anything to indicate she recognizes him. She doesn’t remember him. He tries to let himself relax.

“You knew Steve Rogers,” he says without preamble. He meant to ask it as a question but it ends up sounding just short of an accusation. “You knew him during the war.”

There’s a beat, and he’s afraid that he’s upset her. Her brow creases and her lips press together in a small, tight frown. “I did know him,” she says quietly. “He was a good man.”

He doesn’t want to push, so he waits.

“He was my greatest friend during the war. There were plenty of men who took me very seriously in the military, but none of them quite had the same conviction that Steve did. He saved a lot of men in that war. Good men.”

He nods, then has a thought that makes his nervous again. He begins wandering around the room, checking the most likely places an agent might hide a bug. He checks her bookshelf, a painting on the far wall, a vase of carnations sitting on her desk. She watches him, her hands folded in her lap.

“I don’t think you’ll find any wires here,” Peggy says from the bed behind him. He turns around.

“I told Nick that he would have hell to pay if he tried to bug this room,” she goes on. “But by all means, keep looking. I’ve heard that Nick Fury hasn’t been the most trustworthy lately. His word might not mean as much as it used to.”

Nick Fury, Director of SHIELD. Threat level 7. 188 centimeters tall, 100 kilograms, on guard and heavily armed. Blitz attack or long range high precision kill recommended. Dead in 7 hours.

He finishes checking the room until he’s scoured it to his satisfaction. When he finds nothing, he takes the chair that Peggy mentioned earlier and brings it next to her bed. He sits, tries not to look threatening.

“Why did you come here?” she asks him.

“I don’t…” he starts, but pauses, rethinking. “I need to learn about Steve. To know him.” _Again_ , he doesn’t add. Know him again.

“You’re not asking about the serum, are you?” Peggy asks, suspicious for the first time during their conversation. He shakes his head. “Good. Because I was never involved with the technical portions of the project, and I poured the last of Steve Rogers’ blood samples over the side of the Brooklyn bridge in the 40s.”

“Why?”

“Because it wasn’t the government's to have,” she answers firmly. “There will never be another Steve Rogers. I simply don’t believe that they’ll ever find another candidate. Even in the training camp, I knew he would.... He....” She stops, collecting her thoughts. Then she says, “There’s a blue notebook on the left side of my desk. Would you bring it to me? And a pen.”

He retrieves the notebook and pen and she takes them gingerly, laying the notebook open on her lap. With slow, trembling fingers, she begins to write, her script careful, controlled. He watches her until she sets down her pen and sighs. She closes her eyes.

He waits another minute before he starts to think that she’s forgotten he’s there. The door is open. Should he leave? He gets to his feet and walks quietly toward the door.

“He jumped on a grenade once during training, did you know that?” Peggy says. He stops and turns to look at her. Her eyes are still closed. “It was a dummy grenade, of course, but he didn’t know that. The other recruits, they scattered, like they were supposed to. Like they were taught to. But Steve? He ran straight for it, no hesitation. Told everyone else to run. He never did follow the rules, did he?”

There’s something there, vague in the back of his head. “No, he didn’t,” he replies, and knows what he’s saying is true. He remembers the shadow of a feeling, worry turned into frustration or fear or rage. His own voice rings out in his mind—a memory: “ _You Goddamn fucking idiot, why do you keep trying to get yourself fucking killed? For Christ’s sake, Rogers..._ ”

He slips out into the hallway and leaves the door open behind him, just a crack. He doesn’t want to close it just yet.

—

He leaves the nursing home the same way he came in, and takes several bread rolls from the buffet and a ballpoint pen from a clipboard on his way out. The garage door is closed now, the delivery truck having since left, but there’s an emergency exit that he takes instead.

He has to find somewhere to sleep tonight.

There’s an overpass nearby, and just behind it, there’s a thicket of untamed brush. There are bark chips scattered periodically, so it must have been landscaped at some point, but the city has since abandoned it, forsaking it to the weeds. When he approaches it, he sees a threadbare blanket and a bag full of trash. This had once been someone else’s sleeping place, he guesses.

He sits on the ground out of sight from the sidewalk and takes out the pen and the pamphlet he took from the Smithsonian. He begins to write. The words are scrunched and small around the edge of the brochure and barely legible, but he knows what they say. It’s enough.

_—_

_He—Steve—he was standing by the stove. Suspenders dangling from his waist, he had shrugged them off. Shoulders too narrow. Too thin, like always. Both hands in his pockets, watching water boil. A can in the pot. Beans. The kind from the market four blocks north. The market owner was Italian. He was a large man, dark hair. Mustache. Three daughters. His name was...._

_—_

_Used to sit side by side next to the radiator with the radio propped up on a chair. Just kids—1929? 1930? Listened to an adventure program. The floor was coarse wood, smooth? No, rough. Freezing cold. The radiator was warm. He was warm, body heat. The closer we sat, the warmer we were._

_—_

_Adams. The name of the street where Steve and I lived at the end of the 30s. Apartment 3C._

_—_

When he visits Peggy again the next day, he uses the main entrance and checks in at the front desk.

It’s a risky move. He notices the security camera mounted just behind the desk when he walks in, and all he can do is pull his cap down a little more over his face. It’s most likely a private security system, at least. Less of a chance that SHIELD is tapped in. Or Hydra.

The woman sitting behind the desk has a kind face, and she smiles warmly at him as he approaches her. “Hello, welcome to Forest Hills. Are you here to visit one of our residents?”

“Yeah,” he says. He clears his throat. “Georgia Lewis, please.”

“Alright, well why don’t you sign in on the sheet, here, and then you can make your way over to her room down the left hallway, there. Room 143, I do believe.”

“Thank you,” he says. He takes the pen on the sign-in sheet and hovers over the “NAME” section, unsure. Then he writes “Joseph Barnes” in careful, neat print, adds the rest of the information, and walks in the direction the woman had mentioned.

“Have a nice visit,” she says as he leaves. He nods back at her.

Peggy is asleep when he opens her door. He hesitates, wondering if he should leave, and it’s like it’s yesterday all over again. Then Peggy stirs. She opens her eyes, looks at him, and says, “Are you going to stand in my doorway or are you going to come inside?”

He goes inside.

—

She tells him about when she and Steve first met. She helped oversee the training for the recruits of Project Rebirth. “I was hoping it would be him,” she says with a fond smile. “On the first day they were all lined up and there was one man—I can’t remember his name anymore—but he said something quite rude to me, and I, I hit him, I think,” she says, chuckling a little. “I caught Steve trying not to smile after that. At first I thought he was laughing at the man I’d hit, but then something else happened  a few days later.... I can’t remember what it was, some other comment. I had that man running laps until long after sundown, and I remember Steve looking at me like I’d hung the moon.”

She pauses, looks down at her hands for a quiet moment.

“The more the other troops grew to despise me, the more Steve made a point to... to... support me, I suppose. He didn’t speak out or confront anyone on my behalf, not when I was there to do it myself. He left the confrontation to me, and I was grateful to him for that. But he always did something to make sure I knew that I wasn’t alone, that if I ever wanted to take a step back he’d be there, fists first. We shared a kinship, I think. We were the outsiders....” She trails off and turns to the window. He waits.

Several minutes later, she turns back to him and startles.

“Oh! You surprised me,” she says. “Is it time for lunch already?”

“No, I’m sorry,” he says, and stands. “I’ll let you rest.”

When he leaves, he thinks he sees a nurse watching him down the hall, but when he turns to look she’s already gone.

—

He writes on the back of a flyer this time from a pinboard in the cafeteria. The pen sometimes rips through the thin paper and his letters are stiff and lurching, flickering back and forth between English and Russian, but he’ll make do.

—

_I went dancing in Greenwich village. Once, at least. I brought a girl I met, the daughter of the man who owned the garage I worked at. The garage was called Levi’s. That was his name, Levi. His daughter was beautiful, dark hair and hazel eyes. I don’t remember her name._

_She had a friend so I told her to bring her, and I brought Steve. Steve didn’t like dancing, but he came anyway. I think he had fun. The girl's friend was nice, and she was small like him. Blonde? Her name was Madeline. They talked more than they danced._

_I remember that girl’s last name, too: Galway. I don’t know why I can’t think of Levi’s daughter’s name. I tried for a month to get her to come out dancing with me. I think her name started with a G._

_—_

_We were on the front in 1944. Autumn, but autumn in Poland is cold. We had our warmest coats on and a fire. The wood we were using was mostly sticks and we had to keep putting new tinder on. We were telling stories. Someone was passing around a bottle of whiskey he had liberated._

_It was Morita, Morita passing the whiskey. Jim Morita. He was from Fresno. He kept a picture of his wife and daughter in his breast pocket._

_—_

_Gabrielle?_

_—_

On the third day, he and Peggy spend nearly an hour in silence. She’s writing in her notebook, and his fingers itch to record some words of his own, but he doesn’t have any paper. They talked about Steve after the serum, about what he did with the Howling Commandos, and the memories are swirling in his head, clawing to make purchase on a thought that sticks. Eventually he uses the pen he stole on the first day to scribble half-sentences onto the sleeve of his shirt. He’s nearly covered the whole left cuff when Peggy says, “You’re ruining your shirt. It might be a bit more sensible to use a notebook, hm?”

He glances up, and Peggy is looking at him with an expression he might even call fond. Not for the first time, he wonders what she sees when she looks at him.

“There’s a notebook on the bookshelf to my right. It’s brown leather, six or seven inches tall. I think it’s on the first shelf, but if you don’t find it it might be on the second. Could you get it for me?”

He goes to the bookshelf and looks at the weathered spines assembled there: _Jane Eyre, A Tale of Two Cities, Montage of a Dream Deferred_. He thinks he might have to start checking the second shelf when he sees it, almost hidden behind a large volume of Shakespeare at the far right end of the shelf. Out of all the books there, this one looks to be in the worst condition. The leather on its spine is worn so thin in places that the glue and cardboard are showing through. He pulls gently at the journal until it’s been freed completely from the shelf, then looks at the cover.

He knows this notebook.

He’s in Austria, 1945. The snow is packed hard beneath his boots as he surveys the Hydra camp they just raided. His job is to make sure everyone else did their job. It’s a euphemistic way to say he’s supposed to make sure everyone in the camp is dead. So far it’s looking like his brothers in arms were pretty diligent.

He finds the captain—or he guesses he was the captain—near the south side of the camp. The man’s face is full of bullets, but through the blood he looks young. It’s Dugan’s handiwork, or possibly his own. Probably his own. He’s a better shot than Dugan. The captain’s pack is lying a few feet away from his body.

Bucky takes the bag and dumps it into the snow. Inside are a pack of smokes, some rations, various other survival supplies, and a leather notebook. He pockets the smokes and the rations and then picks up the notebook to flip through it. Most of it is blank, but the first couple pages are scribbled with some German gibberish in some sort of code. He tears out the first two pages and stuffs them in his breast pocket, then puts the journal in his own pack.

The others are setting up camp about 50 yards from the Hydra base in a thicket just uphill from all the corpses. They’ve already got a fire going—no need to worry about their smoke being spotted, since Hydra thinks this is their camp. Ration tins are coming out.

“Hey,” Bucky says as he approaches, taking the pages he stole out of his coat. He hands them to Gabe. “Found this on a Kraut. Think he was the captain. Can you decode this?”

Gabe just gives him a look as if to say he’s insulted that Bucky even has to ask. He mutters something that sounds like “Fucker,” under his breath and flips through the pages as Bucky takes his usual seat next to Steve.

“You’re only eating one?” Bucky asks when he notices the sole empty ration container Steve’s holding in his hands.

“Buck, enough with the mother hen act,” Steve sighs. They’ve had this argument before. “They’re called rations for a reason. I’m rationing.”

“Yeah, most people living off rations don’t have metabolisms running at five times the normal human rate,” Bucky argues back. It’s like a dance by now. They both know the steps, who says what.

“Yeah, well, the rest of you—”

“For Christ’s sake, Steve, you’re being an idiot,” he interrupts. He reaches into his pack and hands Steve one of his own ration containers. “Take it.”

“No.”

“Fucking take it,” Bucky says, “or I swear to God I’ll shoot you.”

Morita sends Bucky a sideways look from where he’s sitting on top of his pack, a couple yards away, and Steve glares at Bucky but takes the food. “What are you going to eat then, huh?”

Bucky produces the ration container he took from the Hydra captain from his pocket. “I took more than just the journal from the Kraut.”

“You’re eating…”

“Yeah.”

Steve doesn’t object outright, just gives him an uneasy look and opens the container Bucky gave him.

They’re all more or less finished eating when Bucky remembers. “Oh,” he says, opening his pack again to pull out the journal. “You forgot your sketchpad back at the base. Think you can make use of this one ‘til we get back?”

Steve is apprehensive. “You took this from the captain too?”

“Yeah, so?”

Steve shakes his head and takes the journal. He doesn’t look happy about it.

Bucky knows that Steve is uncomfortable with using dead men’s belongings. It crosses some moral line Steve’s drawn out for himself, and Bucky understands that, he does, but this is war. They kill people. In the business of putting bullets through people’s heads, taking their stuff shouldn’t be that big of a deal.

It doesn’t matter anyway. He and Steve aren't going to talk about it again. This is an old disagreement, one that Bucky’s pretty sure he won in the end. Steve never takes stuff himself, but he never says anything when Bucky takes shit from the battlefield anymore. He even still wears that cross Bucky found for him last Christmas.

By sundown the fire is burning on brand new logs. The sun is hanging low over the mountains, its light painting the horizon a deep crimson color that reflects a red glow over the snow at their feet. There’s a breeze running through camp that goes right through his jacket, no matter how close he sits to the fire.

Gabe stands. “Good news or bad news?” he says.

“Good news,” Steve says.

“I cracked the code Bucky found. It looks like a new one they cooked up, so as long as they don’t know we can read it, we should be able to listen in on their messages for a while.”

“And the bad news?”

“This piece of code says that they’re moving Zola. In two days.”

“What?” says Falsworth, sitting up. “But we’ve been tracking him here for the last _week_. You’re saying that just when we’ve finally gotten close they’re moving him?”

“ _Putain...._ ” Dernier mutters.

“Hold on, this might not be a bad thing,” Steve says. “If they’re moving him, then he’ll be vulnerable. It doesn’t say where they’re moving him to, does it?”

“No, it just says he’s going by train.”

“Train. That’s good. That’s good,” Steve says, repeating it like he’s trying to convince himself that it’s true rather than the rest of them. Bucky and Morita share another glance. Sharing glances is at least half of their relationship. “If he’s taking a train, then there’s only a few places he could be going," Steve barrels on. "We have maps of all the tracks leading out of the area. I can contact Peg—um, Agent Carter and, uh, she’ll be able to help us narrow it down.”

“Right,” says Dugan. “Tell Peg—oh, ‘ _Agent Carter_ ,’ that we said hi when you call her, alright?”

“Yeah, okay, I will if you shut the hell up,” Steve says, but he’s grinning a little, and probably blushing, too, Bucky thinks. Or maybe it’s just the cold. He looks down at the shadows creeping across the snow towards his boots as the sun sinks lower and lower, and shivers.

He’s still shivering when sits back down in his seat next to Peggy’s bed in the nursing home, back in the present, the leather journal in his hands. When he opens it, he can see the rough edges along the inside where two pages were ripped out long ago.

“He left it with me after, well. After they captured Zola.”

He nods. He doesn’t have to ask why.

“I don’t think he used it very much—he didn’t like to draw on lined paper,” Peggy continues. “But there are still a few drawings in there. Turn the page. Take a look.”

He flips past the first empty page and it’s like a punch to the gut. It’s his own face staring back, in profile. Incomplete, but still very clearly him. He turns to the next page, and it’s Gabe and Dugan now, and Peggy, and him again, in the bottom corner. The next page is another portrait of Peggy, only half-finished.

“It’s yours, if you want it,” Peggy says.

“I can’t. It doesn’t belong—”

“I can’t think of anyone else who this journal belongs to more,” Peggy says earnestly.

“You don’t know me,” he says, but it’s more of a question than a statement.

“Not quite...” she replies, studying him, “but almost. I think....”

The door to Peggy’s suite opens, and a nurse walks in, pulling a cart of food behind her. “Lunch time,” she says. She gives him a look that makes him feel nervous and intrusive. He stands and moves his chair to make room.

“I’ll let you eat,” he says, then slips out the door. He keeps the notebook.

—

That night when he takes out his pen to write, he finds himself hesitant, his pen hovering over the first empty page after Steve’s drawings in the notebook. He doesn’t know what to write. The blank paper stares back almost mockingly, as if daring him to think of something worthy enough to put into words. He’d had so much to write earlier, why is he having trouble now?

Filling the first blank page is... intimidating. Eventually he takes out the crumpled brochure from the Smithsonian and the flyer from the bulletin board and begins inserting them into the first and second pages. He cuts small slits into the journal page with his knife, one for each corner of the square papers he’s inserting, and gently slides the corners into place like photographs in an album. He skips over two more blank pages—he’ll save the space to copy in the rest of what he wrote over the last few days—and finally starts to write.

—

_We fought a lot about enlistment. I got a letter, but I never told him that. I think he would have been mad if he knew I was going because I didn’t have another choice. He might have never forgiven me._

_Would I have gone if I hadn’t gotten the letter? I don’t know. I don’t know if I knew back then either._

_There was one fight, a really bad one, that I remembered in Peggy's room today. It was January, after Pearl Harbor. We were sitting at the kitchen table in our apartment. Steve had just come back with his second 4F. He was angry, I was angry. We were both hungry and cold, too, which didn’t help. I think our building’s radiator had gone out. Or maybe that was a different year?_

_That night I told him that it was downright stupid for him to go out there, that it’d be suicide for a guy like him. He was furious, even though I was right. Steve had asthma. That alone would have been enough to count him out, but there were other things too._

_Steve wouldn’t stop arguing with me. He had something to say about every word I threw at him. He could get one of those fancy inhalers, he said. Guns weren’t as heavy as they used to be, he said. He could train, he said._

_If all he wanted to do was to do his part, he could have stayed on the homefront. There were plenty of important jobs to be done in Brooklyn. But that wasn’t it—or at least not all of it. We both knew that._

_Some part of him needed to prove that he could do everything everyone else could do, that he could really make a difference. But why would someone want to throw their life away like that? Why would you try so hard for something that you knew would get you killed? How can you be so reckless? You can’t help anybody if you’re dead. You were so ready to leave everyone behind, to leave me behind, to pursue this righteous fantasy you thought up. You_

_I’ll stop. This wasn’t supposed to be a letter._

_I don’t know where that came from._

—

The supply of food he brought with him from the Virginia suburbs runs out after he visits Peggy for the third time, even though he's been rationing it, so he plans to take food from the nursing home somehow. Stealing every day is risky—more opportunities to get caught or recognized—but he doesn’t have the time or resources to plan out a large-scale theft. For now, his plan is to start small.

There’s a special corridor where nurses and other assistants go to retrieve carts of food for residents who can’t leave their rooms. It requires an ID badge to enter, but inside there are refrigerators with pre-prepared trays of food stacked on shelf after shelf after shelf. He waits near the door until a nurse comes by with a cart to fill. He waits until the nurse leaves, then catches the door before it can slam shut again. He slips inside easily.

He’s about to pull a tray out of the furthest fridge when the door opens again. “Hey!” a voice calls out.

He stops immediately and whirls around.

The woman approaching him is tall. She’s wearing a nurse’s uniform and her dark hair is pulled back away from her face in a low ponytail. _(Confrontational stance, loose clothing could hide concealed weapons or body armor. 5’10” or 5’11”—but still shorter. Size and height difference provide an advantage. Kneecaps, shoulder, palm to the base of the skull—)_

“What are you doing here?” she asks him, stopping about five feet away. “You’ve been visiting Peggy’s room the last three days, and now you’re stealing food. Why? How do you know Peggy?"

He takes a breath and tries to process all the questions. She watches him, eyes fierce, her arms braced at her sides. He recognizes her. She glared at him when she was bringing Peggy's lunch. “You’re Peggy’s nurse,” he realizes.

“Yes,” she says. “Why are you here?”

“I don’t want to hurt her,” he tells the nurse, because it’s true. He doesn’t know how to answer the rest of her questions. “I just wanted to talk to her.”

“You talk about Steve Rogers,” she says like an accusation, and he doesn’t flinch, he thinks. Just nods. He wonders how much of their conversation she’s heard, how much she’s managed to figure out.

“You don’t sign in to see her, you sign in to see someone else.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want people knowing you’re here?”

“No.”

She stares at him for a long moment, her eyes hard and searching. Then her expression relaxes, her fists unclenching, and she sighs. “I’ve been Peggy’s nurse for five years,” she says. “She’s a very special woman. The last few years have been hard for her, after her husband died and after An—well, after some of her other friends passed. Her dementia hasn’t been getting any better either. But I’ve heard her talk more about herself and her memories in the last three days than she has in the whole month. I think that’s a good thing,” she says carefully. “I think you’re a good thing for her.”

He almost laughs. It’s absurd, to think that the presence of a mass murderer, a world-renowned assassin is somehow making Peggy Carter’s life better. He doesn’t interrupt the nurse, though. He doesn’t know what to say.

“I’m Andra,” the nurse says. He thinks she’s going to ask for his name, or try to shake his hand, but she doesn’t. “Go ahead and take the food you need for now. We can figure the rest out later.”

She turns and leaves the food room. He’s not quite sure what she means by “the rest” but he takes a tray of food anyway and slinks out the door.

—

Not all the memories he writes in the notebook Peggy gave him are ones he wants to keep, but he feels a duty to record them anyway.

—

_Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira. April 6th, 1994. I was sent to Kigali, Rwanda. Hydra wanted Wakandan weapons, but it wasn’t feasible to invade such an advanced and heavily armed nation. Intercepting smuggled weapons in Rwanda was a much easier plan. The country was in ceasefire, in the middle of a civil war and both sides were building up their armories virtually unchecked._

_Hydra wanted to help tensions boil over. They sent me to assassinate several Rwandan and Burundian officials. They were all on a plane about to land at the Kigali International Airport. I used a surface-to-air missile mounted on my shoulder to take down the plane. The first shot went to the wing and the second went to the tail. Of the twelve people on the plane, there were no survivors._

_The kickback from the missiles was strong, but my left arm is designed to withstand worse. In the air, the missiles were bright red, like a flare. The sound they made as they streaked through the sky was deafening. I think it broke the sound barrier. The plane burst into flame upon impact and there was orange and white and an explosion even louder than the missiles, and the heat was so intense that I could feel it on my face. My mouth and nose were covered by a mask. My arms and legs had Kevlar armor and leather. I’d taken off my goggles for better aim. I could feel the fire on my eyes as I watched the plane fall._

_A genocide was spurred by these assassinations. Over the course of the four months I was sent in periodically to extract the weapons Hydra was looking for during the chaos. I don’t know how many died in the massacres, but I think it was in the hundreds of thousands._


	3. Chapter 3

He continues to steal food from the refrigerators the next two mornings before his visits with Peggy and eats in the corner of the cafeteria. He thinks that some of the other nurses notice him, but if they think his behavior is strange, they don’t comment on it. After a few days of stolen meals, Andra figures out “the rest” and hands him something that looks like a credit card one morning.

“This will buy you food from the cafeteria. It should have enough meal credits on there to last you a while. Let me know if it runs out,” she says.

“Why are you giving me this?” he asks.

“Because you need food,” she says simply.

“But why are you....” The only thing he can think of is “helping” but the word catches in his throat. He violently tries to push away the urge to run. _(The card is simple plastic, flexible. A tracking device? A micro-explosive? The food they give him could be poisoned. Or a sedative. A remote-activated depressant designed to force complacency—)_

It’s ridiculous, he knows. There are much simpler ways to capture him than a card, or poison. He can’t push the feeling, though, can’t shake away the suspicion that there’s more to this than he knows.

“Where did the money for this card come from?” he asks her instead. A simpler question.

“We have a complimentary dining card program for prospective residents to use when they visit the home. We have a budget set aside for it, but it rarely gets used for more than a few meals a month,” Andra says. “It’s perfectly above board for me to give this to you. Not that you seem to care all that much about being above board.”

He looks at the card for another long moment, then puts it in the pocket of his jeans.

“You can also use that card to access the gym facilities. And the showers,” she adds.

Showers become a part of his routine. He can take a hint.

—

_Sam Giancana. Former leader of the Chicago mafia. Sixty-seven years old. Shot and killed in his kitchen on June 19th, 1975 before testifying in a case investigating the death of John F. Kennedy._

_He would have talked._ _Hydra doesn't take chances._

—

_~~You~~ He liked his coffee black. Maybe that wouldn’t have been true if sugar hadn’t started to get so expensive, maybe ~~you~~ he would have started to like it other ways. On the front, there wasn’t any sugar at all. We had instant coffee in our ration packs and that was it. Steve didn’t mind instant coffee back home, but war is different, apparently. He said he didn’t get the same rush anymore, after the serum. ~~You didn’t~~ He didn’t drink alcohol much anymore either for the same reasons. I thought that was bullshit. I thought that you just hadn’t had enough of it yet. _

—

Over the next several weeks, a pattern is established. He comes in the morning, signs in at the front desk, takes food from the cafeteria with Andra’s card, and eats in the corner. He exercises in the rarely-used resident gym for an hour or two, and then he showers in the gym locker rooms, alone with the curtain drawn. His left arm isn’t a typical prosthetic. He doesn’t want to draw attention.

His arm does worry him, on occasion. He’s mostly sure that it’s water resistant, and he was never briefed about any precautions he should take around water, but he has no idea what kind of maintenance they did on his arm in between missions. It’s possible they did almost nothing, and it’s also possible that they installed new plating and rewired it every time. Perhaps his arm is just as prone to damage by repeated exposure to water as any other metal object, and Hydra just decided that it would be better to invest in constant upkeep instead of a more permanent solution. Perhaps they did this intentionally as a failsafe in case he ever decided to escape. If he can’t repair it himself then he’s less of a liability when they eventually recapture him.

He was fully submerged in the Potomac after the battle on the helicarriers. He didn’t experience any shortcircuiting or other electrical issues he might have expected from an electromechanical appendage. But he has started to notice thin lines of discoloration around the places where the plates of his arm meet, red-orange marks that seem to grow larger every time he looks. He’s rusting, at least a little. He hasn’t had any movement issues yet but it’s only a matter of time. He keeps his arm out of the spray of the showerhead as much as he can.

Once he’s finished showering, he re-dresses in his clean set of clothes and brings the dirty ones to the nursing home’s laundry room. Then he visits Peggy. He stays there for as long as Peggy seems able to accommodate him—sometimes just an hour, sometimes right until the end of visiting hours.

Occasionally, Andra finds him beforehand to warn him that Peggy will be having a visitor in her suite that day, that this person happens to be someone important in SHIELD, or the US government, and that this person would be there between this time and that time. He stays clear of the nursing home those days. They’re few and far and in between, but he won’t take unnecessary risks.

Peggy is usually alone. He helps her with tasks around her suite, he has lunch with her, he shares memories with her, he listens to her, he watches TV with her, he sits with her in companionable silence as they read books from her shelf, or write, or listen to records from her record player. Sometimes Andra joins them. She’s witty with a dry sense of humor that leaves him at a loss for what to say. She and Peggy are clearly good friends, even if Peggy doesn’t always remember her name on bad days. Andra knows how Peggy likes her tea, what movies she likes, which nightgowns are her favorites. Slowly, he learns these things too. He builds a mosaic of past and present, of remembered details and new ones that comprise the woman known as Peggy Carter.

He and Peggy work together to do the same for Steve Rogers. Sometimes it feels almost like a ritual, what they do. She describes a memory, and occasionally he describes one back, and they exchange thoughts back and forth, over and over again until one of them falls silent. Sometimes she switches memories halfway through telling them, and sometimes he loses one too, lost in the whirlwind of memories trying to a home in his scattered mind. As time passes, they uncover more and more memories. It’s like kicking up dust. The more they walk through the field the thicker the haze becomes.

Despite the increase of memories, he does feel like he’s beginning to understand the context of what he remembers. He knows enough now to have a timeline, almost, a vague understanding of whether a memory comes before or after. It’s a step, at least.

After meeting with Peggy, he usually grabs another meal from the cafeteria, picks up his clothes from the laundry room, and leaves the nursing home. He returns to his hollow next to the overpass and writes until it’s too dark for him to write anymore. Then he sleeps. Tries to sleep. It's an ongoing battle.

He can feel himself growing used to the routine, comfortable with it, even. It’s a bad idea. He knows it’s a bad idea. He should be looking for a more permanent undercover plan. He should be leaving Washington D.C. at the next opportunity, but. But.

—

“ _You,_ ” he writes without thinking, then lifts his pen and crosses out the word. Ever since he started using this new notebook, he’s had trouble writing about Steve in the third person. In his head, he realizes, he’s been telling Steve all these memories, like a Catholic trying to repent in confession.

(Steve was the Catholic, not him. He doesn’t think he believes in anything, really. His mom was Jewish, and his dad was a lapsed Protestant. Most of his memories of church are vague, just snapshots of moments when he was a kid. He doesn’t think his family was very religious.)

He’s not sure why talking to Steve is his mind’s default now. It wasn’t when he started. But now it’s hard to start a sentence without writing, “ _You were_ ” or “ _You said_ ” or “ _You thought_.”

He wonders if maybe he should embrace it. What’s to stop him? Steve won’t have to see what he’s written. It’s purely an exercise.

“ _You_ ," he writes again. It feels right. He doesn’t cross it out this time.

—

_You wore the same suit to my sister’s wedding that you wore to your mother’s funeral. There was only a year between the two times your wore it. You were nineteen when your ma died, and you were twenty when Becca got married to.... God, his name was Steve, wasn’t it? That was awkward, I remember. We kept catching each other’s eyes during the ceremony while trying not to laugh._

_I remember how happy they looked. Becca, she couldn’t stop smiling. Her cheeks probably hurt by the end of the ceremony. Steve—Becca’s Steve—never stopped looking at her, not for a second. Not even when the priest was feeding him lines. He was so sweet on her that everyone in the audience could have been naked and he wouldn’t have even noticed, or spared them a glance._

_When we got back to our apartment that night, I remember thinking that more than half of the people we went to school with were already married. I think we talked about it, a little, and I really wanted you to have what Steve and Becca had. I set you up with more girls after that even though I don’t think that’s what you really wanted me to do. To be honest, I don’t know if it was what I wanted to do either._

_—_

_During June of 1944, we made a week-long pitstop in London to get the details of our next mission. Agent Carter was already there when we arrived, of course. We met up with her at the canteen on site. The moment she walked through the door you gave her the Steve-to-Becca look and I knew you were going to marry that girl. I left pretty soon after that—can’t remember why. Guess I wanted to give you two some privacy, maybe. I remember trying to dislike her but I couldn’t. She was perfect. She was your forever girl._

—

“He saved my husband in the war. Did you know that?”

He turns to look at Peggy, but her eyes are still watching the TV screen, a small sad smile on her lips. There’s a fresh bouquet of carnations on her bedside table that wasn’t there when he left yesterday morning. It must have shown up after he left to avoid Peggy's afternoon guest. Whoever it was must have brought it for her.

“Steve and my husband Eugene, they didn’t know each other,” Peggy continues. “He saved Eugene’s regiment in 1944. All 1,200 men.”

“I remember hearing that," he says "In the Smithsonian, there’s—”

“An interview, yes, I remember,” she says. “That interview was the week following our wedding. Right when we got back from our honeymoon. We didn’t even want to take a honeymoon—I had work to do at the SSR, he had had work to do for the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. But we had appearances to keep up, you know. Had to put on a show....”

She trails off, her eyes losing focus as she watches the television. They sit in silence long enough that he stops waiting for an answer. The movie they’re watching is Peggy’s favorite, an independent film called “To Love Another Day” from the late 50s. They’ve seen multiple times in the last two weeks.

“She’s such a good actress, don’t you think?” Peggy says several minutes later, her voice quiet. The woman on the screen is sitting alone at a cafe. He thinks the character’s name is Marie.

“I—yes, I guess,” he says. There are tears in the actress’ eyes, but she isn’t crying. She’s looking out the window, her face framed in profile with curly brown her hair tucked behind her ears. He can see the emotion in her expression, and it looks real enough—believable, even. But he can’t imagine ever holding that much feeling in a single moment. He wonders if he’s always been this way, or if this is yet another thing that Hydra has stolen from him.

Peggy’s asleep by the time the movie is over, but he watches it all the way through.

—

_Mary Pinchot Meyer. Ex-wife to CIA official Cord Meyer, mistress to President John F. Kennedy, and uneasy CIA informant. She was told that this was about making peace with Cuba. She didn’t know how far Hydra had managed to infiltrate into the United States’ intelligence agencies._

_Or perhaps she did. She knew something, something Kennedy had told her or something she had overheard during one of of her visits with CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton. In a rare case of oversight, Hydra didn’t know that she’d figured things out and didn’t blackmail or otherwise ensure her silence. After the winter of 1963, Mary Pinchot Meyer dropped off their map, living quietly as an artist in Georgetown. She was smart. She didn’t talk._

_For a whole year, Hydra forgot about her. I guess there must have been other more important loose ends to tie up. There were so many, after Dallas._

_In October of 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer made her first move. She tried to arrange an anonymous meeting with a journalist back at her apartment. That was all it took to put her back on Hydra’s radar. Hydra acted accordingly. I acted accordingly._

_October 12, 1964. Make it public. Send a message._

_Two bullets: left temple, lower back._

—

He knew that it was only a matter of time.

He’s almost at his sleeping place one evening when he realizes that someone has been there. Even from half a block away, he can see that the bushes and grass around his spot have been trodden on. He guesses from the footprints in the dust several feet away that whoever it was is tall—6 feet tall, at least—and wears shoes designed for combat. The traffic camera across the street is normally pointed at the cars crossing the overpass, his hideaway easily out of its line of sight. Now, from 200 feet away, he notices that it's pointed downward and to the right at an awkward angle. His place isn't hidden anymore. They're watching him. He can't stay near the overpass. He has to move.

He turns around and heads the opposite direction, away from the camera. He hopes they don't know he's been going to the nursing home—that could make Peggy a target. He lays low the next day and doesn't go to visit Peggy. Instead, he spends the time as far away from the nursing home as he can get, trying to lure whoever is watching him in a different direction. He goes towards the east side, then doubles back and lets himself get partially photographed by a security camera in front of a convenience store. The angle of the camera won't allow them to know it's him for sure, but if they're looking, this will be the first place they check.

He goes south and runs through one more security camera there. He keeps going south until nightfall when he doubles back again, more carefully this time, and returns to the area around the nursing home. He doesn't sleep that night. He can't let down his guard.

“You look tired,” Andra says the next morning when she sees him at breakfast. He just nods. She doesn't ask him where he was, and he doesn't tell her. When she comes by Peggy's room later that morning, she brings him a coffee—black. No sugar.

—

_I lost count of how many men I shot for you. Before the 107th was captured every man I killed made me feel like shit, like you’re supposed to feel. It weighs on you, itching at the back of your mind, so that when you finally get shot yourself, you’re not even too upset about it. It’s just karma. I was carrying a lot of ghosts with me before you came along, but I think I made a whole graveyard with you. I didn’t even have the decency to feel guilty about it._

_It’s like this: if anyone tried to hurt you, I shot them. Simple. I slept like a baby every night knowing I’d kept you safe._

_Only, maybe that’s not true. I do remember thinking a handful of times in a removed, disconnected sort of way that something bad was happening to me. I was scared of how much I was willing to do for you. I wasn’t going to stop, though—I felt out of control, like I didn’t have a choice. There was a part of me that just wanted to take us home back to Brooklyn and turn back the clock to the way things were when we were teenagers. Even though we were hungry and tired and cold, and you got sick all the time, and I was always exhausted from working at the docks, at least we weren’t here. At least you didn’t have to see this side of me._

_Maybe that’s what scared me the most. I’d turned myself into something awful for you. I didn’t want you to see the monster you made of me._

—

“Happy birthday, Steve,” Peggy says quietly, as though she’s saying it to herself and didn’t mean him to hear. It’s long after visiting hours, but Andra said it was alright, just this once. They can’t see any fireworks from the window of Peggy’s suite, but they can hear them, the loud cracks making the water shiver in the glass next to Peggy’s bed. He feels on edge. He knows that there’s a big difference between bombs and fireworks, that the resonance is different, that he would _know_ if there were real explosions out there, but some part of his mind refuses to believe it. His fists clench tighter with each echo. It’s 1943 and he’s in the trenches. The enemy gunfire is getting louder, he’s—

“You had fireworks back in New York, didn’t you?” Peggy asks him. He blinks.

“Yeah,” he says, then stops. _She knows, she knows, she knows._  “...How’d you know I’m from New York?”

“I can hear it in your voice sometimes,” she says with a pensive look. “Not as much at first, but more often now.”

“Oh.”

“I’m not wrong, am I?”

“No,” he admits. “You’re not wrong.”

“Sound like him, sometimes,” she says, quiet again, “or Angie.” She closes her eyes, her hands folded lightly over her chest.

He wants to ask questions, to find out more, but when he finally thinks of what to say Peggy has fallen asleep. He leaves her room silently amidst the dull thunder of distant fireworks. Another day. Another time.

—

 _When you turned 18 we snuck out onto the roof of your and your ma’s apartment complex. A couple guys down the street were lighting some smaller fireworks off in the alleyway that divided your building from the one next to it, and we lied on our stomachs with our heads over the edge and watched until they left. It was probably two in the morning. We sat up farther away from the edge and leaned against the smokestacks. There was another person lighting off big ones several blocks away but they were behind some other tenements and we couldn’t see them. We just heard the_ boom, boom, boom _and the echoes as they ricocheted from building to building._

_I remember looking at you in the dark, and I could barely see your face. The streetlights below were lighting you up from underneath. I know exactly what you looked like then. The shadows made your cheekbones look sharper, the hollows of your neck deeper, your eyes softer.  I wanted to touch your hair so I reached over and ran my hand through it backwards, just to mess it up. You gave me a look. Then you leaned over and rested your head on my shoulder._

_I didn’t move. I tried to keep my whole body both relaxed and motionless at the same time. I was frozen because I was scared that if I moved you’d leave._

_But you didn’t leave. We fell asleep up there in the dark and the summer heat, and the sound of fireworks didn’t mean anything but home._

—

In late July, the Avengers are called to defend civilians from a Hydra attack in Laos. He’s been visiting Peggy for four months. They’re in her suite, quietly listening to a playlist of 1930s songs Peggy’s granddaughter had made for her, when Andra walks in and says, “You should turn on the news.”

A weight settles in the pit of his stomach. He takes the remote from Peggy’s bedside table and flicks on the television, and suddenly Steve’s face is filling up the screen. His skin is covered in blood and dirt and he looks tired, so tired.

“—think Hydra was planning a desperate move to take over a position of power in the East,” the reporter is saying as they switch away from Steve’s face to pan over an area of destroyed houses and rubble. Then they switch again to footage of Iron Man flying over the city. “The Avengers were called in as soon as world governments received word of the situation. The battle is still in progress....”

And then it’s Steve again, from a distance now, getting out of a helicopter. Steve and his team, taking fire from unseen opponents. Steve with a paramedic getting bandages put on a wound before he gets back into the—

He’s not even aware that his fists are clenched crushingly tight until he begins to register the pain of his nails digging into the meat of his right hand. He looks down and sees he’s managed to break skin. Four evenly spaced red crescents mark his palm like something tried to claw inside.

“I need to go,” he says. He stands and leaves the room.

He’s halfway down the hall when Andra yells, “Hey!” and jogs after him. She grabs his left arm by the wrist. When no skin gives under her grip and her fingers curl around hard metal, he thinks she’s going to run, or maybe he will. _(Height advantage, vulnerable stance, fragile grip, element of surprise—)_

But Andra doesn’t seem surprised. She simply lets go when he stops in the middle of the hallway and turns to look at her.

“Where are you going?” she asks him.

 _Laos_ , he realizes. He didn’t even know that was his answer until she asked.

“He needs....” he begins, stops. Starts again, “I have to be....”

“Is this about Steve?” she asks carefully. He stares at her, at the cautious crease of her brows, at the determined angle of her chin, and says nothing.

“You’ve been avoiding him—avoiding the whole world—and there’s a reason for that, I know. Listen, _I know_. Do you really think you’re ready to face him again? Do you have a plan?”

He can’t process her questions, there’s too much. All he can see is Steve’s face, and the blood. He inhales and exhales and thinks. Closes his eyes.

The questions settle in the forefront of his mind, the questions she’s asking him, the implications of those questions. What she means, what she said. _Listen, I know._ His heart quickens.

“You know who I am?” he asks her. She hesitates, then nods. For the first time since he met her, she looks afraid.

“How?” he asks

Andra takes a step back now, her hands up in a placating gesture, her lips pressed together in a tight line. “I’m not just a nurse,” she says. “I’m a SHIELD agent.”

The adrenaline surges. He doesn’t know if he’s running or fighting until he moves towards her rather than away. His arm—the flesh one—is slamming into her sternum, not hard enough to break anything but with enough force to push her back and knock the wind out of her. Only, she moves her body to follow the direction of the attack, lessening the impact, and she’s dropping to the ground, swinging her leg around underneath him.

He’s on the floor. He fell on his back. He scrambles to his feet and barrels into her right as she’s moving in for the next blow, or maybe standing after the last one. This time, the impact with the wall definitely leaves her winded.

 _What are you doing?_ asks a voice in his head. _What’s your play?_

He’s not sure. The Soldier’s metal hand is holding her against the wall just below her neck, hard enough to bruise. He pushes harder and Andra winces visibly. The whites of her eyes are bright.

“Stop,” she says. Her voice is clear, controlled, but she looks terrified. She holds up a cell phone in her right hand. The screen lights up. It’s dialing a number.

“If I don’t say something or if I hang up,” Andra says slowly, “they’ll send a team here to investigate.”

There’s a long, tense moment where something dark and violent settles over his mind, and he thinks he’s going to kill her, strangle her against the wall. Then the feeling is gone and he stumbles backward, releasing her. She doubles over immediately and gasps for breath.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He thinks he’s shaking.

Andra only nods her head and puts the phone against her ear. “Hello, yes, sorry about that.... No, everything is fine.... I thought there was a situation but everything’s under control.... Yes.... Yes.... Okay, thank you. Goodbye.”

She closes the phone and puts it in her pocket. They stare at each other in the empty hallway.

"I'm sorry," he murmurs again. There's disgust settling in now—disgust with himself, disgust for what he might have done.

"It's fine," Andra says. "Let's just move on."

"But—"

" _It's fine_ , really. I get it. We don't have to talk about it."

It doesn't seem like it's fine, not with the way her eyes are still wide and her face is still pale. He lets the subject drop anyway, though. She asked, after all. It's the least he can do.

“What do they know?” he asks her eventually, when his thoughts come in words instead of instincts or actions.

“They don’t know anything,” she says. He must look confused, because she clarifies, “I haven’t told them you’re here.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Nick Fury assigned me to protect Peggy, since she didn’t want any surveillance equipment in her room. I only report back with information once a week. But back in April, I put this place on lockdown as soon as I began to suspect something was wrong inside SHIELD,” Andra says. “I disabled all the security cameras and switched them to a private local server. I replaced the lock on Peggy’s door. I bolted the windows.  I personally screened every member of security. I.... I didn’t know who to trust.”

She pauses, studying his face as if looking for an answer there. He doesn’t know what to say. Eventually she continues.

“Keeping Peggy safe was my top priority. I didn’t let anyone into the building until three days after the coup when Steve Rogers himself came by to check on Peggy—”

“Steve was here?” he interrupts.

“Yes,” she says cautiously. He doesn’t blame her for being wary. His last reaction to seeing Steve wasn’t overly positive, and that was only on a TV screen. “Steve came by to make sure everything was okay here. Then he told me about you. Not everything—he didn’t tell me who you were, exactly—he just said you were a friend—but I had my theories. He probably thought he was being cryptic but he’s not very good at that, is he?”

In another situation, he might have smiled at that. She’s right. Steve was never good at being subtle.

“He asked me to disregard the ‘kill on sight’ order that SHIELD had placed on the Winter Soldier,” Andra says. “He asked me to call him first if the Winter Soldier ever came to the nursing home. For some reason he thought you might come here. He said you’d been brainwashed by Hydra, but that you’d broken through the conditioning, and you weren’t dangerous unless you were threatened. I took that with a grain of salt.” She rubs at her neck again, at the pale blue finger marks spreading over her skin, and his heart drops.

“But he didn’t tell you who I was?”

“Other than the Winter Soldier? No.”

“Why didn’t you call Steve?” he asks. The obvious question.

“Because you weren’t causing any trouble. Because you seemed lost. Because your visits were helping Peggy, and you didn't seem to want Steve to find you.”

“How could you know that?” he asks her. “What if I was just trying to find Steve without getting SHIELD’s attention?”

“If that was the case, I’m not sure why you’d want to start here, at Peggy’s nursing home,” Andra says. “He’s not a hard guy to track. He leaves a pretty big paper trail everywhere he goes.”

He could go looking for him. He could find him. He knows where Steve is right now, knows the city and the country. He could go.

“Was I wrong?” Andra asks, her tone gentle and genuine. She wants to know his answer. “Should I have called Steve?”

“No,” he responds. “I wasn’t looking for him.”

“Then why were you so eager to leave as soon as you saw him on TV?”

“I.... I don’t know.”

It’s only a little bit of a lie.

She stares at him for a long moment, as though she can will out the truth with her eyes. She gives up after a few beats and sighs. “Now that all my cards are on the table, I’m going to get you a room inside the home, okay?” she says. “It’s a lot safer for you in here than it is sleeping outside every night, trust me.”

He nods. She’s right.

He wants to trust her. She's done nothing to betray his trust, and if anyone has been acting less than trustworthy, it's been him. He remembers Andra listening quietly as he and Peggy exchanged memories from the war. He was comfortable enough to still share those memories while she was there. What does he have to lose, really? His life? He already lost that once, and he’s not sure he ever really got it back anyway.

“Okay,” he says. He takes a deep breath and leaps into the abyss. “I trust you.”

It will take some time for those words to be true, but saying them is half the battle won.

—

After a tense two hours in front of the television screen in Peggy’s room, the newscaster announces that the Avengers have defeated the Hydra attack force in Laos, and that no one on the team has suffered any serious injuries. Still, it shakes him. He’s nothing more than a spectator, stranded at the other side of the world and forced to do nothing more than watch the battle unfold.

Andra is true to her word. By the end of the day, there is a suite set up for him just down the hall from Peggy. It’s smaller than most of the other rooms, but there’s a bed, a bathroom, and a table. The placard outside his door says “Joseph Barnes”.

“You used that name to sign in several times,” Andra offers as an explanation. Then she hesitates before asking, “Is that your father’s name? Your grandfather’s name?”

“No,” he replies, frowning. “It’s my brother’s.”

Andra nods, like she’d been expecting this. He realizes a moment too late that he probably just confirmed some theory of hers, that he probably just destroyed any chance he might have had at playing off his appearance as family resemblance, but he can’t bring himself to care. Something has changed. It’s like he suddenly exists in more places than just inside his head, like he wasn’t quite real before now. Andra _knows_ him, knows who he is. He wonders how someone else can know him like this when he's has only just begun to know himself.

—

It doesn’t stop after Laos.

Whatever dust the Avengers kicked up in Southeast Asia spreads around the world like a plague all throughout August. It’s all Hydra, no doubt. The more bases the Avengers take down the more attacks there seem to be. It’s a vicious cycle.

It’s just an outbreak, he knows. He remembers how Hydra works. After a month of attacks like these they’ll draw back and lay low, wait for the next opportunity to strike. As it is Hydra is already weak. They won’t be able to keep this up for long.

He tells himself this, but it doesn’t make it easier to watch.

He doesn’t remember having felt this way before, doesn’t remember ever having been on the watching side rather than the acting side. He wonders if this is how Steve felt before he got his 1A.

There’s a facility the Avengers face off with in the Maryina Horka Forest of Belarus. The battle is too remote and chaotic for any reporters to get near enough to film anything. They keep showing the same old outdated pictures of the building, back when it was an academy for young girls. He’s waiting for an update, waiting for any kind of development, but the minutes tick by and they rerun the segment again and again and again. The fifth time they show the photos, Peggy says, “I’ve been there before.”

“Where?” he asks.

“The academy,” she says. “In 1946.”

“Why were you at an academy in Belarus?”

“It was a training program for Russian assassins,” Peggy says. “They take young girls and brainwash them to be exceptional killers and spies. I believe it was the ancestor of the Black Widow program.”

The Black Widow. A nuclear engineer. Odessa, Iran. A car, the tires, 400 meters, a cliff. A single shot. Two birds, one stone.

“I think I’ve met one of their assassins before,” he murmurs.

Peggy nods. “So have I,” she says, her eyes distant. “She was my neighbor for a short while. Angie and I—”

Peggy hesitates. She gestures for the glass of water sitting on her nightstand and he hands it to her. After taking a long sip, she hands it back and continues. “There was a boarding house I lived in for a time in New York. One of that academy’s assassins was sent to kill me, or spy on me, perhaps—I’m still not sure which, though she did try to kill me eventually.”

“Why was she trying to kill you?” he asks.

“They’d stolen some of Howard’s inventions and I was onto them.”

“Howard? You mean—”

“Howard Stark, yes.”

 _Howard Stark_. As soon as he hears the name he’s in a crowd. It’s 1943, he’s _home_. In front of him is a stage with bright lights and girls and the most beautiful car he’s ever seen, lipstick red and gleaming. The chrome grille is shining bright enough to blind. Howard Stark is standing at a podium, smiling out at the crowd, wearing a smart black suit with a scarlet pocket square blazing on his chest.

As Bucky watches, the girls remove the wheels of the car. Howard Stark pushes a lever and there’s a subtle whirring noise, and the car is rising from the ground, hovering just a foot above the stage. But then there’s a popping sound (a screeching sound?), and the car wobbles (tilts, flips, tumbles) and then it’s crashing, loud and hard, slamming into the ground (the _tree)_ with a clash like crunching metal, like glass shattering and bones breaking and Howard Stark, his _face_ —

His face is bloody. It’s not 1943 anymore but it’s not 2014. He gets off the motorcycle and his feet hit the black pavement and crunch over shards of windshield glass and he can smell smoke and burnt rubber, so pungent he can taste it. There’s blood, too, now that he’s closer. Its scent is thick and metallic, muted compared to the acrid smells from the car but still firmly present in the air he breathes. The driver’s side window is smashed and one of his targets is inside. The other is on the ground a few feet away. Both are battered and bloodied from the crash but not dead, not yet, not finished. His mission is not complete.

He goes to the man first. The collision threw him out of the vehicle and he’s lying on the pavement, on his hands and knees. There’s blood dripping from his mouth, and a there's a wound staining the fabric over his chest deep scarlet.

“Help my wife,” the man begs. “Please. Help her.”

He grabs the man by the hair and yanks his head upward. There’s blood on more than just his mouth and chest—it’s on his cheek, his hair, his nose. The man stares at him, his eyes wide. “Sergeant Barnes,” he says.

The name echoes, splits him in two. Half of him can’t move, can’t think, can only repeat the name. _Sergeant Barnes_. The other half grips the man’s hair tighter, pulls him up higher, then hits him twice, hard, with his metal fist. Hard enough to dent iron. Hard enough to smash his skull.

_Sergeant Barnes._

It’s a name, it’s a name, it’s a name, it’s a name he knew and now he doesn’t, it’s the name of a dead man. _Sergeant Barnes_. _His_ name. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, Serial Number 32557038. Sergeant James—

“Buchanan Barnes, serial number three-two-five-five-seven-zero—”

“Hey.”

He’s in Peggy’s suite. There’s a hand on his shoulder. He flinches away. He’s rocking in his seat. His face and fingertips are numb and prickling and he’s breathing too fast, too much. Everything is shaking. No—it’s just him. His right hand is trembling so much he can barely grip Peggy’s bedside table. His left hand is deadly still.

“Are you okay?” It’s Andra. Her voice, it was her hand on his shoulder.

“No,” he croaks, then stumbles into Peggy’s bathroom to be sick.

He retches into the toilet bowl more times than he can count. When he finally stops heaving, his eyes are wet and he’s quaking and clammy, and there’s a fresh glass of water sitting on the bathroom counter. Andra. He manages to grab it from where he is on the floor without spilling it but half the water goes down his chin when he tries to bring the glass to his lips.

“What happened?” asks Andra from the doorway.

He shakes his head. She presses on anyway.

“The Avengers took down the base in Belarus, if that was—”

“No, it wasn’t that.”

“Okay,” she says, and leans against the doorframe. “Did you remember something? Something that they did to you?”

He laughs humorlessly and shakes his head again. “Not something they did to me. Something I did.”

“If Steve was telling the truth about the brainwashing thing,” Andra says, “then it wasn’t really you.”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know,” he says. There’s a lump in his throat and his eyes are stinging so he bites the inside of his cheek. He waits a moment, then says, “I killed Howard and Maria Stark.”

She goes quiet, just as he thought she would.

“I also had a hand in starting the Rwandan genocide,” he continues, “and I think I shot President Kennedy, too.”

“...You think? You don’t know for sure?”

He pauses. A motorcade, clear skies, a topless limousine. A shot through the back of the skull.

“No,” he says quietly, “I’m sure.”

“My God.” Her voice is barely a whisper.

He doesn’t know what else to say.


	4. Chapter 4

Andra is a little more careful around him after his confession. She pretends not to be, and he appreciates that, but it still makes him feel like shit. It’s not her fault, and he doesn’t blame her. She has every right to be cautious after he admitted to murdering multiple world leaders as well as one of the founders of the organization she works for—or, used to work for. “ _It wasn’t really you_ ,” she said, and he thinks she might even believe that, but believing and internalizing are different things.

Peggy falls asleep one afternoon after watching _To Love Another Day_ for the second time that week. Bucky’s staring at the pages of a book in Russian, trying to force himself to make sense of the Cyrillic characters, but his mind hasn’t quite settled from the flashback he experienced the other day. He can call it what it was now—a flashback. They aren’t usually that bad but then, he hasn’t had many flashbacks from the time when he was the Winter Soldier. Luckily those memories have been filtering back at their own pace, gradually reassembling themselves in his mind without forcing him to re-experience them in vivid detail. He only has to do that while he’s asleep.

There’s a quiet knock at the door. When he turns around, Andra is standing there, looking unsure. “Is she asleep already?” she asks. “I was going to bring her some dinner....”

“Yeah, she’s asleep,” he says. An uncomfortable silence stretches between them as Andra stands by the door and he tries to think of something to say.

In the end, he doesn’t have to. Andra speaks first, pointing at the book in his hands. “You know Russian?” she asks.

“Uh,” he hesitates, a little thrown. “Yes. I.... I do.”

She walks through the doorway and closes the door behind her gently before carefully taking a seat at the foot of Peggy’s bed. “What other languages can you speak?”

He thinks about it for a moment, deliberate when he answers, “Most Slavic languages, I think. Also Spanish, Portuguese, and German. Mandarin and Japanese, basic Arabic, basic Punjabi. I have passable Urdu and Bengali.”

“What about French? Did you ever learn French?”

He pauses, then shakes his head. “No. I guess they didn’t think it was important for me to know French.”

“I learned French,” Andra tells him. “In Romania, we learn English first, and then a second foreign language. I decided to learn French.”

“You’re from Romania?”

She nods. “I lived there until I was seventeen. Then I moved to the United States. A year later I joined SHIELD.”

“Did you come to America to join SHIELD? Or....” There’s a question there, but he doesn’t know how to phrase it.

“I didn’t know I would join SHIELD when I came here, so no, I guess,” Andra says, and now there’s another question hanging in the air, unanswered.

He decides to ask it. “Why did you come?”

She’s quiet again when she says, “I wanted to be someone I wasn’t allowed to be in Romania.”

He doesn’t want to push. He doesn’t want her to think he isn’t listening. He says nothing and hopes she understands.

“When I was born,” Andra says, “my parents named me Andrei. Andrei Robert Frumosu. But I didn’t want to be.... to be _Andrei_. I didn’t feel like I could be anything but Andrei if I stayed in Romania, so I left. I saw pictures of Pride festivals in San Francisco and thought that the United States would be a good place to go, but honestly most places here aren’t any better than Romania.

“I might have given up and gone home if SHIELD hadn’t recruited me when they did. SHIELD is.... SHIELD was good. Their benefits were great. They paid for my surgery and hormones before I’d even been working there for a year. But I guess SHIELD’s gone now, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry,” he says. The words feel weak on his tongue but they’re the only ones he can give her.

“It’s okay for now. I still work for SHIELD, technically. SHIELD doesn’t fall in a day. It takes time to lay off and relocate fifty thousand employees, especially ones in ‘critical positions.’”

“The nursing home would hire you,” he says suddenly. “You’re a great nurse. You’ve been here a long time.”

“You’re right. I think they would,” she says. She looks sad, her gaze distant. “It’s just hard to let go.”

He doesn’t think they’re back to the way they were now, but they’re better. Better is all he’s ever hoped for.

 —

 _You couldn’t speak Irish Gaelic, but your ma knew it growing up, and there were things you said every now and then, just words or phrases, that made me think that you knew more of it than you let on. When we were kids you would say things like “_ A Rí! _” and “_ Mo Dhia! _” and I don’t think you realized that they didn’t mean anything in English until I pointed it out. You stopped saying them after that, which pissed me off, because that’s not what I’d wanted._

 _I think I’d still catch you saying “_ Póg mo thóin” _though. It means “Kiss my ass”. You told me so._

_I wonder if you still say that, or if you’ve grown out of it. I hope you haven’t._

—

_We shared a bed for most of the winter of 1935. I hated going home—didn’t want to see my father—and your ma could never turn me away, even though sometimes it meant there was another mouth to feed. I tried to eat at home most of the time but I slept next to you in your bed almost every night. We were too old to be doing that. We didn’t fit. But it was cold. The couch was uncomfortable. You insisted._

_I should have refused because even if your intentions were innocent, I don’t know if mine were. I remember feeling guilty. There were only two times I would pray: when you were sick and when I was lying next to you in that bed. The church never saw as many prayers from me as your pillow did that winter._

—

“I don’t think he ever really understood the effect he had on people, after the procedure,” Peggy says. It’s just before sunset in early September, and the sun is making her whole suite glow yellow. The maple leaves outside Peggy’s window have just begun to turn. The foliage is still green, but with the occasional red and orange interspersed among the branches to remind him that even though the four walls of Peggy’s suite seem timeless, the world outside is still moving on.

“What do you mean?” he asks her.

“Women paid attention to him,” Peggy clarifies. “Not military women, generally. There was one....” She trails off, a small frown on her face. Then she shakes her head. “Most of the women in the American military weren’t interested in men at all. They’d joined because they heard they’d meet other women like them. But on the tours, before he went overseas?” She laughs. “God, he was so oblivious.”

“Dames didn’t pay him much attention before,” he feels compelled to say. “I guess he wasn’t prepared for that.”

“No, no he wasn’t,” she agrees. “He did get better, though. The night after he returned from rescuing....” She glances at him and pauses, for only a moment. “From rescuing the 107th, I came to find him at a bombed-out bar he was in with some of the people who would become the Howling Commandos. I wore a dress—”

“A red dress,” he interrupts. She nods.

“A red dress,” Peggy echoes. “I didn’t stay long, but I came to tell him that there was some equipment he should look at in the morning. I think I flirted with him, and he actually managed to flirt back....”

He remembers.

It’s 1944. This time it’s like slipping under bathwater: gentle and slow, not like plunging into the sea, not like fighting the tides for space at the surface and a chance to breathe. He’s standing next to the bar and Steve is by his side. There’s a drink in his hand but not in Steve’s, and it’s loud. A few feet away, Dugan, Morita, Jones, Falsworth, and Dernier are drinking boisterously. Bucky doesn’t have it in him to be like that, not tonight. His head's too full, too busy, too fragile.

He could have said no. Should have said no. Steve asked him to join his team, to go back into the field, and he knows he’s not ready, knows he won’t be for a long time after the shit they put him through in that lab. Steve can take care of himself now. He doesn’t need Bucky to watch his back anymore.

(But maybe that’s what scared him into saying ‘yes’. Maybe he needs to be needed. If Steve wants him to be his sharp shooter then by God, that’s what Bucky will be.)

It’s been a long time since he’s seen Steve. He stares at Steve’s face, at the new hardness of it, and can’t quite bring himself to believe that those sharp edges are real, that the face of the Steve he remembers isn’t going to reappear the moment he looks away.

He knows it’s not fair for him to feel loss, but he does. He misses Steve being smaller than him, misses the way he used to be able to sling his arm over Steve’s shoulder, misses the way he’d had to change pace to match Steve’s shorter strides. He misses Steve’s hands, his narrow shoulders, his collar bones. There are so many things that he misses that he thinks his heart might break with all the wanting for something so impossible.

“You okay?” Steve asks. He’d caught Bucky staring. “I know it’s a big change, but—”

“No, it’s not that,” Bucky lies. “I just missed your sorry ass, ‘s all.”

Steve manages a weak smile. “You sure you’re feeling alright, though?”

“I’m—” _Bitter,_ he could say. _Resentful. Twisted. Selfish. Useless. Broken. Sweet on you, Stevie. More than I’ll ever be able to come back from. I’ll probably die out here still in love with you._

“—fine,” he says. That one's the biggest lie.

Steve doesn’t look very convinced, because Bucky's not doing a very good job at being convincing. He tries to grin but can’t, so he settles for another sip of his drink.

And then she walks in. Her dress is carnation red, a beacon in the drab earthy blacks and browns of the bar. When Steve looks up and sees her, Bucky knows. With every step she takes towards them, Bucky feels himself fade into the bar behind them a little bit more.

He never wanted Steve to want him back. Bucky’s going to hell, but he’s not selfish enough to take Steve down with him. It still hurts, though. Following Steve was never easy, and this.... This is going to be one of the most difficult things Bucky has ever done.

It's 2014 again. When he surfaces, blinking and disoriented in the warm walls of Peggy’s suite, Peggy is watching him.

“Another one of your memories?” she asks, a strange look on her face.

He nods. “Yes, I....” _I’ll probably die out here still in love with you._ “I just.... I just remembered something I used to.... Something I.....”

He feels no different, sees the world with the same eyes, experiences no earth-shattering revelations. It’s simply putting a word to something he already knew. _Love_. He loves him. It’s a quiet realization, like the gentle spreading of light across the horizon at dawn, like finally taking a step back from a finished puzzle to see the whole picture.

It’s been here all along, this love. He just didn’t understand what he was looking at.

“Are you alright?” she asks after another beat of silence.

“No.... Not yet,” he answers honestly. “I will be, though. I think I.... I just understood something really important about myself.”

“That’s a good thing, you know,” says Peggy. There’s a small smile on her lips, and he does his best to return the smile.

“Yeah,” he tells her. “Yeah, I know.”

Peggy watches him, but says nothing. He thinks the conversation has died until she asks, with clear eyes and a small voice, “James?”

 _James_ , the name his father called him. _James_ , the name his teachers used in school. _James_ , the name on his draft letter, on his enlistment forms, on his paycheck. _James_ , a name he shared with two of his fellow Howling Commandos and more men in his original unit than he could count. _James_ , his Christian name. The one he never could convince Peggy not to use.

“Yes?” he says.

“He loved you,” says Peggy, serious like lives depend on her words. “He _loved_ you, James.”

He feels himself shaking his head, and he thinks that it’s a memory talking when he says, “No, he.... You were his girl. He was head over heels for you, everyone could see it.”

She shakes her head. “He had a big heart, our Steve,” says Peggy. “Do you understand?”

And—it’s surreal, like a dream, but he thinks he does. He does understand.

“Yes,” he tells her.

She nods, relaxing back into her bed. “Good,” she says. She blinks. Something dims in her eyes, and he knows she’s somewhere else now, lost in a different part of reality where she can’t call him _James_ anymore. The moment has passed but her words still hang in the air between them like static charge. The hair on his arms stands on end.

He does understand. If there was one thing Steve could do better than anyone else, it was loving. He loved so many people all at once that he’d never been sure how Steve’s heart could take it. So it made sense, then, that Steve would love multiple people _like that,_ too. He wasn’t the sort to just love once.

He wonders if Steve still feels that way about him, even after everything that’s happened. He remembers the falling helicarrier, the cold steel, the face of the man under him, bruised and bloodied. _I’m with you ‘til the end of the line_ , he’d said.

If that wasn’t an answer then he isn’t sure he'll ever find one.

—

“Can you put in _To Love Another Day_? It’s such a good film,” Peggy says one afternoon in October. Fall is in full swing. The dying leaves have turned the trees a fiery red-orange, surrounding them on all sides with a flaming sea of foliage with nothing but the window to keep them apart. A new bouquet of carnations sits on a table at the opposite side of the room, courtesy of one of the handful of guests Peggy receives every now and then. He never sticks around to meet them.

“It’s been ages since I’ve seen _To Love Another Day_ ,” says Peggy. It hasn’t—they watched it yesterday—but he doesn’t say so. Peggy has been losing herself more and more lately. She forgets what people have said as soon as they’ve said it, sometimes—forgets whether it’s morning or evening, whether they've already eaten lunch. Some days are better, but others are much, much worse.

He puts the DVD into the old television and uses the remote to start the movie.

He’s seen it enough times by now to know what happens when, but Peggy knows every line, even on her worst day. He sees her mouth the words sometimes, sees the small, delicate movements of her lips as she follows along with the actors on the screen.

About half-way through the movie, Andra arrives with dinner, and it’s then that something changes in Peggy’s face. She’s watching the movie like she normally does, with a rapt attention she lends to nothing but this. He looks away, at his food, at Andra, and when he looks back, there are streaks of tears down Peggy’s face and despair in her eyes.

Andra notices too. “Are you okay?” she asks Peggy, who nods.

“I’m sorry,” Peggy says. “It’s just—” She takes in a shuddering breath. “It’s the film, I suppose. Angie leaves her husband in the next scene. Look at me, I’m getting all emotional. It’s silly—I’ve seen this movie a hundred times. I don’t know what came over me.”

The character who leaves her husband is named Marie—not Angie. There is no Angie in the film.

When Andra leaves to clear away their dinner and the movie fades to black, he lets the credits roll on a hunch. Sure enough, the actress’s name next to “Marie Hendricks” is familiar: “Angie Martinelli”.

“Peggy?” he asks.

“Hm?”

“You’ve mentioned Angie a few times, but you’ve never talked about her much.”

“Angie?” Peggy says. “Who is Angie?”

“Nevermind,” he says. It’s one of those days. He doesn't want to upset her.

—

He waits until Peggy is asleep. The sun, setting earlier and earlier now, has already passed the line of the horizon, and the curtains of Peggy’s room have already been drawn, leaving nothing but a faint glow to see by. Carefully, he pads around Peggy’s bed and to the bookshelf at the other side of the room, where, on the bottom shelf, he knows he’ll find a small box of photographs hidden behind a battered copy of _Moby Dick_. Sure enough, it’s still there. He found it once while looking for reading material, but at the time he’d been too guilty to open it. Now he still feels the guilt, itching at the back of his mind, but the need to know is stronger, this time. He opens the box.

The photos inside range everywhere from grainy black and white to modern color. The photo on the top looks the oldest. In it a young girl is clutching the arm of a slightly older boy, her dress hiked up past her knees and her face blurred, as though she couldn’t stand to sit still for even a single photograph. The next picture is a class photo, three rows of girls in matching uniforms standing and looking at the camera. Some are smiling. Some look bored.

Another photo, and this one of a man and a woman who is very clearly of Peggy, though a younger Peggy than he’d met on the front. The date written at the bottom right corner is 1940. He flips the photo over and finds the words “Fred and Peggy, Engaged April 8th, 1939”. Peggy’s face in the picture looks vacant, like the girls in the school photo. The man in the photo seems distant as well, his expression polite.

One more photo. A man, very different from the one with Peggy in the previous photo. This man has the same hair as Peggy, the same eyes. He’s wearing a British Army uniform with his hat at a jaunty angle, and he’s grinning wide and open. _Michael Carter, 1940_ , the back of the photo says.

The photos after the first four are all familiar scenes: army barracks, soldiers in line, Peggy next to an American tank. There’s one of Steve before the serum, wearing a white SSR shirt and looking away from the photographer. The photo is well worn, folded so many times in certain places that he’s afraid the photograph will fall apart in his fingers. There are others of Steve after the procedure, too, photos of him in uniform, performing field tests, grinning with the commandos.

When the photos of war end, he finds what he’s looking for. There are only three photos, but it’s enough. The first photo is Angie, the actress from the film. She’s sitting on the arm of a sofa in a grand-looking apartment, wearing clothes sewn back together too many times to match the thoughtless extravagance around her. The lighting is bad, a window just behind her making her backlit, and the photo looks unplanned. The way Angie is smiling, though, her gaze fixed at something just behind the camera, is genuine.

The second photo is Angie on a movie set of some kind. Her hair is done differently than it was on the last photo, pinned up elegantly at the back of her head. She wears a dark dress that hugs her figure and drapes all the way down to her ankles. It’s not a dress he recognizes from the movie that Peggy watches, so he wonders if this was an audition. Regardless, Angie is stunning, even in black and white.

The last photo is the only one he needed to see, really. It’s the first one in color, and both Peggy and Angie are in the photo, as well as Howard Stark and another man and woman he doesn’t recognize. Peggy and Angie are standing side by side, pressed close together like they’re trying to fit into the photo, though there’s plenty of empty space on either side. It’s a failed photo. He suspects it was supposed to be a portrait, but everyone seems to have lost interest in the camera. Only the unnamed woman is looking in the right direction. Howard Stark’s right arm is a blur, and he’s facing the other man in the photo like he’s trying to explain something complicated. Peggy and Angie aren’t looking into the camera, either. They’re staring at each other with matching smiles, laughing at some private joke like they’re the only people in the world. Near the bottom of the frame, so subtle you could almost miss it, their hands are linked together.

“Angie was my dearest friend,” says Peggy. He startles and nearly drops the box.

“I’m sorry,” he apologizes. “I shouldn't have—”

“No, I don’t mind,” she says. When he turns around, she’s lying on her back on the bed with her head tilted towards him, watching.

“She was your dearest friend?” he prompts hesitantly.

“Yes,” Peggy says, smiling. “She was my dearest friend the same way that Steve was yours.”

He nods, accepting the pointed comment without resistance. There’s another question he wants answered, but doesn’t want to ask. Peggy has become accustomed sensing his reluctance and guesses, “You want to know what happened to her.”

“...Yes,” he says.

She sighs, small. She closes her eyes and he almost thinks she’s going to go back to sleep when she says, “I met Angie in 1946. We were quite inseparable for many years. We lived together in in one of Howard Stark’s apartments in New York for four years, aside from a brief stint I spent working a case in Los Angeles. We were so happy. “

He can’t see much of her face in the dark, so it takes him a moment to realize she’s crying, for the second time today. His hands tighten around the box of photos but he says nothing.

“In the fall of 1950,” Peggy says, “we went dancing, just the two of us. We went to a jazz club. I brought her violets. We danced together on the floor, in front of anyone, and I kissed her there, and—”

She stops, breathes a shuddering breath.

“You have to understand. Angie was becoming a known actress. Not famous, but.... She could have made it, I think. And I was becoming very well known in other circles, dangerous ones. I had a lot of enemies. I knew that if people saw me with her, saw how much she meant to me, someone might try to use her to hurt me. But I didn’t care—I was foolish and in love. And Angie paid the price for that.

“A man got out of a cab and shot Angie as we walked home from the jazz club that night. A bullet to the chest. It was my fault.”

“Did you ever find the man who killed her?” he asks in the silence that follows.

“He didn’t kill her. She survived,” Peggy says quickly. “But she was in the hospital for weeks. We didn’t find the man, not at first. The SSR decided that it was too dangerous for her to go back out in the public eye, that if her attacker knew she had survived, he might try again. Her acting career was over. They gave her a new identity and sent her away from New York.

“I could have gone with her, The SSR had assumed, actually, that I would. They sent Angie to Washington D. C. because it would be easy to relocate me there. But I—I couldn’t. I had put her in danger. They were after me, not her, not really. I realized that the farther away from me she was, the safer she was.”

“What did you tell her?”

“The truth. We fought about it. She said it should be her choice, that she knew the risks. But I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to her again. We parted ways. Three years later I married my husband Eugene.”

“You weren’t worried about putting him in danger?”

“No, I was,” Peggy says, “but he was a government man. He’d made plenty of his own enemies with the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. it could be argued that he endangered me as much as I endangered him. Our children, they were what worried me. But we were lucky. There were no more attacks. My husband died of heart failure nine years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s been a long time,” says Peggy. “I moved into this nursing home shortly after he died. It’s the same home that Angie was living in at the time. I won’t pretend that wasn’t a factor in my coming to Washington. She and I, we had reconnected in the early 90s, soon after my third grandchild was born, before Eugene's heart problems started to get worse.”

“And your husband, while he was alive—”

“He adored Angie,” she says. “Leaving Angie was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, but I can’t help but think it was the right choice. She survived, and lived a long, happy life. We might not have been afforded the same charity had we stayed together. She lived in the suite next door until she also passed away too two years ago.”

“But what you and Angie had stayed together, and nothing had happened? You and Eugene were fine with twice as many threats. Maybe you and her could have had more time,” he says. He doesn’t know why he’s arguing. She seems right, and what she’s said makes sense. But it settles wrong in his mind, foreign and uncomfortable. “What if Angie had never moved on? What if you hadn’t?”

“Everyone can move on. It just takes time.”

“Steve,” he says. “I don’t think he can. Move on, that is. He can’t just let something be. Don’t think he knows how.”

She frowns. “You might be right,” she says. “But perhaps.... Look at him now. It’s been two years since he walked out of the ice. He has friends. He’s saving lives. He’s made himself a life worth living.”

 _I can’t move on,_ he wants to say. _My past won’t be left behind._

“You still have a choice,” she says gently, “but there are times when we have to leave the people we love to keep them safe.”

“I’m a fugitive,” he says. “If Steve found me, he would try to protect me. He would become a fugitive too.”

“Yes.”

“People would get hurt. Steve would fight until he destroyed himself in the process. And I.... I’ve done a lot of things in the name of keeping him safe. Things I’m not proud of.”

“Sometimes the best thing we can do is walk away.”

“And Steve isn’t capable of making that decision,” he says. _But maybe I am._

“No one deserves a clean start more than you,” she says. “But you won’t get one with Steve. I think you’re right, Steve doesn’t know how to leave something alone. You will never get out when you're with him.”

There is a choice to be made. He just doesn't know if he’s ready to make it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I definitely have a shameless reference to "Who is Angie?" in here because i'm trash and i like to suffer. If you don't know what I'm talking about go to toodrunktofindaurl.tumblr.com and suffer with me. :)


	5. Chapter 5

Peggy’s going to have a guest in a couple hours,” Andra tells him. It’s almost November, and the air outside the nursing home is hard and crisp. It tastes like winter. Leaves still cling to some of the trees, but there’s a blanket of red-brown debris covering the grass below Peggy’s window. The world is shifting.

“How long will they be here?” he asks her. She hums contemplatively.

“A few hours, probably,” she says. “He’s a bit of a big shot in SHIELD, or whatever SHIELD is now. You’ll want to steer clear of the home until at least about five o’clock. He won’t be alone, even if he wants to be.”

It’s been a while since he’s left the nursing home. He’s only been outside a handful of times since Andra managed to get him a room, all when Peggy has had guests. It feels strange, to be forced out. He’s started to think of Forest Hills as his home, which he knows is a dangerous thought to have. It’s temporary, he tells himself. But he’s gotten too attached, and being accustomed to this place is holding back his ability to make the decisions he knows he has to make.

He’s only three blocks away when he starts to think he’s being followed. It’s ridiculous. This has to be paranoia, nothing more. And yet....

There’s a man in a suit fifteen yards behind him who is matching his pace exactly.

Ahead of him are three people: an elderly man and woman paying for parking at a meter and an older woman walking her dog. Unlikely. Covers like those would be inconvenient. When he checks across the street, however, he sees two black cars. Tinted windows. Still running. He slows next to a laundromat, as though reading the hours, and the man behind him slows as well.

Perhaps not paranoia.

He does not change his speed. He continues to walk in the same direction, his hands in his pockets and his head down. At the corner of the street there’s a coffee shop. He pays it as little attention as he can until he gets to the door and then slips inside.

It’s not busy—it’s 11:00 AM on a weekday. When he steps inside, the cashier at the front smiles at him. Her hair is tied with a hair tie, and she is leaning towards him with one arm on the counter in front of her. _(Neck exposed, chest unprotected, counter distances her about a foot, one hand out of view—)_

“How can I help you?” she asks. He doesn’t think she can help him, but he doesn’t tell her that, because that’s not what she means.

“Sorry,” he says. “Just passing through.”

The shop has two exits. The corner it’s on is between two busy streets. He entered through the one on the busy street, so he takes the exit that leads to the intersecting road. He looks around him. _(Three cars: two black, one gray. Drivers are the only visible passengers. One pedestrian on a cell phone approximately 7 feet to the left, walking towards the intersection. Building across the street has several windows with clear, unobstructed views of the street below. Ideal vantage points—)_

He walks right, away from the street corner. He makes eye contact with no on. No one looks at him. They avoid him the way their feet might avoid puddles on the sidewalk, their eyes slipping down or to the side. He guesses he looks intimidating, perhaps. He walks faster.

It doesn’t do any good, of course. They’re corralling him.

At the end of the next block there are three more black SUVs positioned at each of the three possible streets he could take: one parked a few feet from a stop sign at the left, one idling in a parking lot at the right street corner, and one parallel parking on the street straight ahead. He’s trapped.

He looks behind him. There’s an alleyway a few feet back, and he bets that it’s being blocked off as well, but at least in an alley, he’ll get to control the pace and direction of the fight. They will only be able to come at him from one side, and the narrowness of the alley will serve as a bottleneck so he will only have to fight a few at once rather than a dozen from all sides.

Then again, he’ll be trapped. Nowhere to run.

He turns on his heel, away from the intersection, and rolls up the sleeves of his shirt. He’ll take his chances with the alleyway.

As he predicted there’s a man in a suit guarding the entrance to the alley. The man wasn’t expecting him. He’s wearing dark sunglasses but even without his eyes visible, it’s easy to see the arch of his eyebrows, the slight gape of surprise.

Without preamble, he knocks the man to the ground with his left arm, sending him flying backwards against a dumpster. The man scrambles to regain his footing but he’s too slow. The metal hand is already there, landing a blow to the man’s temple that draws blood. Another blow and the man is on the concrete, limp and motionless.

Three meters wide, fifty meters long. A dead end—good. One direction of attack. Three windows on the left side are two stories up, impossible to reach from the ground but a potential position for a short-range shooter. A difficult angle, but not impossible. One ground level window, but covered in a metal grating. A single door, likely leading into a restaurant kitchen, next to the dumpster. Guaranteed to be locked, but otherwise unfortified. A potential escape route—

Two people appear at the end of the alleyway—black clothing, military stances. He doesn’t think. He moves.

One on the left, one on the right. Left first. A kick to the kneecap, shattering the patella. The man on the right draws a gun, but the metal hand grabs his wrist and crushes the bone there. He screams. The gun drops. It’s in the Soldier’s hand now, cocked and loaded and a shot, one, two, a third for the man who rounds the corner. Shots through the skull. Deadly. Efficient.

For a moment, it’s quiet.

No time. A fourth shot, this time at the handle of the locked door next to the dumpster. The knob blows off and the door swings open. He charges through.

Racing through a room of terrified kitchen staff and smelling the mix of blood and oil fryers, he starts to feel sick.

His heart is pounding in his chest, his face, his fingertips. He can’t seem to breathe enough air. He’s barely aware he’s running, his body moving without instruction or permission. He bursts out into the restaurant and crashes through the surprised guests to fling open the glass restaurant door, so hard that he leaves a spiderweb of cracks underneath his bloody handprint.

There’s a bus. It’s stopping a half a block to his right. He sprints. People are getting on in the front, stepping off in the back. Ten meters. Five meters. The last person has stepped on the bus, and the door is closing. The door is almost closed but then he’s there, nearly colliding with the back of the bus as he wrenches open the back door, the door furthest from the driver, the door marked “Exit Only”. But the driver is trying to merge back into traffic—she’s not paying attention. The doors close again and the brakes are released and the bus is moving, away from the curb and the alley and the bodies.

He shakes. He breathes.

Slowly, almost without him noticing, the world around him begins to dim, the sounds of the people on the bus around him becoming muffled, like sounds heard underwater. The seat underneath him is solid. He blinks, once, twice. He doesn’t think. He thinks nothing at all, and then—

He’s in a park.

He doesn’t remember getting off the bus, doesn’t remember walking here. He doesn’t know where he is. Breathe. He looks up at the gray November sky and sucks in a shaky breath.

He tries desperately, fervently, not to panic.

He lost time again. He hasn’t lost time like this since he found Peggy. He thought he’d gotten over this, recovered past this.

“Goddamnit,” he murmurs to himself.

His hands. He watches the flesh one tremble while the metal one remains motionless. There’s blood on his knuckles—from punching? A thought—some of this blood could be new. He has no memory of what he’s done since that bus. The idea is like a shot down his spine. He feels sick again.

He lost control. He killed three people, maybe four.

 _They were attacking you_ , says a voice in his head. It sounds like Steve’s voice, or maybe Peggy’s, or Andra’s. _You didn’t have a choice._

But he knows he did. He had a choice between their lives and his own, and he chose his own.

He has to leave. He has to leave the country. Staying at the nursing home was always temporary, and going to Steve had never really been an option. Not now. Not while he’s still like this. He thinks he might have been deluding himself, thinking that the more of his memories he regained, the more worthy he would be of going back to Steve’s side, even if it meant he would never get to leave the firefight Steve lived for. But it’s impossible. The Soldier still lives inside him, waiting for moments like these. He can’t control it because he _is_ the Soldier. It’s a part of him. He can’t leave it behind any more than he can leave behind Bucky Barnes, the kid from Brooklyn.

He has to get out.

First, he has to figure out where he is. The park is nice enough. The grass is green, the leaves still on the trees are brown and orange. The park is busy, despite the overcast weather. There’s a woman in a retail uniform smoking a cigarette next to a tree on my right. A small group of teenagers loiter around a park bench, chattering in loud, competitive voices. One of them says something that makes the rest burst into a round of laughter. He sees an older woman in a pink vest pass them, her border collie trotting beside her on a retractable leash.

This was a poor place to come from a strategy standpoint—too many people, too many potential attackers—but he can’t seem to let himself leave yet, can’t seem to move his feet.. He stands in the middle of the path and lets the people shift and sway around him, a lazy current he’s supposed to sink into. It’s really more like drowning, though. Every bike that hurtles past, every slightly too-loud sound pulls him deeper, and he’s just trying to tread water.

No. He needs to stay lucid.

He looks at the nearest street sign: Pierce Street. The name is familiar. It’s a street close to Peggy’s nursing home. The street crossing it at the nearest intersection is First Street, another familiar name. He’s not far from Forest Hills.

He can go back there and find Andra. He needs help. He trusts her. She has resources he would never be able to gain access to on his own.

His notebook is also back in his room at the nursing home.

He ignores the parts of his mind that try to tell him that whoever attacked him may be looking for him at the Forest Hills, that perhaps he needs to lay low for a few days, that the “SHIELD big shot” Andra warned him about might still be around. He’s made his decision. It was never much of a choice.

—

There is one black SUV in the staff parking lot at the nursing home, but otherwise the area seems clear. He enters through the loading bay, like he did the first time he came here. He feels a pang in his chest when he realizes this may be his last time in the nursing home. The feeling worsens when he realizes he may never see Andra or Peggy again after this, either.

He should have prepared himself better. He’d known something like this was bound to happen.

He walks through the kitchen, into the cafeteria. Both are empty. At this time of day, there would be at least a few residents out at lunch. The hair at the back of his neck stands on end and his whole body goes tense, expecting. He’s about to go down the hall that leads to the residents’ suites when he hears voices coming from the lobby. Voices from large group of people, at least six or seven, drift into the large open space.

He creeps nearer to the hallway, leans against the wall, and listens.

“—must have come this way. We caught him on a security camera just a block south. It can’t be a coincidence.”

“Any witnesses?”

“Yes. Three agents are dead, but there’s a fourth in critical condition. The rest who were following him saw him from a distance but they swear it was his face.”

“But are you sure?”

"It was his him," says a voice.

He knows that voice.

He freezes. The air rushes out of his lungs. His legs feel weak, as though they can’t support his weight. He suddenly feels like he might cry.

He’d know that voice anywhere.

"I saw the footage. I know what he looks like, and that was him," the voice continues.

Steve.

“He could be a lookalike,” says another agent reasonably. “A decoy of some kind.”

"It would have to be a very good lookalike.”

He closes his eyes and breathes. He knows what he’ll see if he looks around the corner, and _God_ , he wants to look. He wants to look like Icarus wanted to feel the sun, and he knows Steve’ll melt him just as bad, send him into a freefall just as deadly. Perhaps just a glance, nothing more. He can spare a glance.

He’s turning his body towards the noise, opening his eyes and holding his breath, when a hand taps his arm, once, lightly. He nearly lashes out on reflex. But it’s Andra, her finger over her lips, staring at him with wide eyes. “Stay here,” she whispers, so quiet he’s reading her lips instead of listening.

She walks across the towards the lobby and turns the corner.

“Oh, Agent Frumosu. Took you long enough.”

“Sorry,” he hears Andra say. “I was at an appointment.”

“You’ve been briefed on the situation?”

“Yes,” Andra says, “and I just don’t see how there’s any way it could be him.”

Then Steve’s voice again, like a blow to the chest. “But we saw the footage. It’s him. That’s his face.” He sounds insistent, desperate.

“There are ways to wear someone else’s face. A Photostatic Veil, for example.”

“A Photostatic—that’s a Nano Mask, right?" an agent says. "How could someone outside of SHIELD get their hands on one of those? All of them are under tight security in the—”

“In the SHIELD storage facility, here in the city, three miles away,” Andra finishes for him. “I went there on a hunch as soon as I heard what was happening. I wanted to check their inventory personally. Sure enough, there is one Photostatic Veil unaccounted for since they updated their inventory database two days ago. Here—this is the report they gave me.”

There’s a pause, presumably as the agents go over the report she’s showing them.

“It would make sense,” a different agent says. “We were all skeptical when the facial recognition in the security feed aggregator picked up his face. Why would Barnes suddenly show up on our radar after such a long time, in Washington D.C., of all places?”

“And this break-in at the SHIELD storage facility, it seems too convenient to be a coincidence—”

“But why would someone want to impersonate a known fugitive?”

“Perhaps to distract us,” Andra’s voice chimes in. There’s a brief pause. “...And to distract Captain Rogers.”

“But what would they be trying to distract us from?”

“I’m not sure. We should check the police scanners in the area....”

As the agents continue to speculate, Andra excuses herself and reappears in the cafeteria. She walks to the other side of the doorway, opposite him and closer to the hallway leading to the suites. She gestures for him to join her. He looks warily at the open doorway that leads directly into the lobby, within clear sight of the agents there trying to find him. And Steve. But Andra gestures again, and he nods. Prepares himself.

He doesn’t look.

In a second he’s standing next to Andra, away from the doorway. Steve’s voice rings in his head, and he thinks he might be leaning to turn around but Andra grabs his arm, holding him in place. Her eyes show him a warning.

She doesn’t let go of his arm as she leads him through the halls to Peggy’s room. He’s grateful. Her hand on his arm grounds him.

—

It takes him less than a minute to pack his things. Andra is pacing near the door of his room, talking on her phone in hushed Romanian. “ _Tonight. Yes,_ ” she’s saying. _“As soon as possible.... Please use discretion...._ ”

The only things in his backpack are his notebook, a pen, and his old uniform. Lightweight. Unobstructive.

“ _T_ _hank you, Dorin. Yes, I’ll let you know. Goodbye.”_ Andra puts down her phone.

“I have a contact in Romania. He’s booking you a taxi that will pick you up from the airport when you fly into Bucharest. The taxi will take you to a place he knows, a hotel that doesn’t ask questions,” she says. Then, as an afterthought, “Is Romania okay?

“Yes,” he says. “Romania’s fine.”

This is happening. He’s leaving.

“I’ve registered you into the Romanian passport database. You are now Alexandru ‘Alex’ Lupec. I’m having a friend make your passport now—she’ll deliver it here in a couple hours.”

He nods. “How will I get to the airport?”

“I’ll drive you.”

“And what about security? I can’t exactly go through a metal detector.”

“I have a device I can put in your bag that will allow me to remotely overwrite the feed to the full-body scanners. The carry on should go through so long as you don’t have any weapons.”

“Will your friends....” He doesn’t know how to ask about trusting them. Getting more people involved makes him uneasy.

“They won’t tell. They’re not with SHIELD, or any government. My contact in Romania is my brother. My friend who is making your passport won’t ever see your face. You’ll be wearing a photostatic veil.”

“A photostatic veil,” he repeats. “The one you stole from the SHIELD storage facility when you went to ‘check’ its inventory?”

“Yes,” she says. “It was the only way—”

“If they catch you, you’ll be charged with treason.”

“If they catch you,” she counters, “they won’t even give you trial.”

She’s right, but it doesn’t make him feel any better. He sighs and drops the subject. “Okay. I’ll wear the photostatic veil. You’ll drive me to the airport, and I’ll go through security and get on the plane. What will I tell the customs officer in Bucharest?”

“According to their systems, you’ve been here for two days. You were here because your best friend from college just died unexpectedly, and you flew into Washington D.C. for his funeral. If they ask where you were staying, you were in the hotel a block down from here.”

“That’s...” he hesitates, “dark, don’t you think?”

“You don’t have enough clothes to pack for them to believe you were gone for a longer trip. And there aren’t many reasons for people to travel such long distances for such a short time—frankly, you can’t pull off a business executive. Besides, with this cover story, if you come across as terse, they’ll think you’re just grieving.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot,” he comments. “What about a suit? Won’t I have had one at the funeral?”

“You rented one here. You didn’t want to travel with a garment bag.”

He nods, committing the story to memory. “When do we leave?”

“Your flight leaves at nine o’clock tonight, so we’re leaving for the airport at five.”

“Okay.”

He has another question he wants answered, but it sticks to his tongue. Finally, he asks, “Why was Steve here, Andra?”

She takes a second to respond. “He was the one visiting Peggy,” she says quietly. “That’s why.”

It makes sense. He’d known that Steve lived in Washington. He should have known that Steve would visit Peggy. He closes his eyes.

“How often does he visit?”

“About once a month.”

“So since I’ve been here—”

“He’s visited seven times.”

“You never told me.”

She says nothing, the air tense.

He tries to let it go, but all he can think about is Steve’s voice in the lobby. She was probably right, not to tell him. Steve is too much, too fast—has always been that way. He needs space. That’s why he came here.

“Okay,” he breathes. “It’s fine. Okay.”

She looks unconvinced but doesn’t challenge him. “Cut your hair before we leave—we don’t want to take any chances. I’ll need to go back to the lobby. I told them I was checking security feeds. But no SHIELD agents are going to come into this section of the nursing home until we leave. It’s private property,” she says, her gaze steady. “If you want to visit Peggy before we go, no one’s going to disturb you. Not even Steve. I promise.”

“...Thank you,” he says. He doesn’t just mean for the privacy. He thinks she understands.

“Of course,” she says. Then she smirks. “I’d risk my life, lie, and steal from private SHIELD storage facilities for just about anyone, though, so don’t start to think you’re special.”

“Okay,” he says, returning the smile. “Got it.”

And then he’s alone.

—

“I’m leaving, Peggy,” he says. He can’t tell if she’s lucid or not. Her eyes are clear, but she’s smiling in a vague sort of way, a way that leaves him guessing.

“For how long?” she asks.

“A long time.”

“I see,” she says. “It’s a shame you’re leaving so soon.... Steve was going to come by later today. You might have gotten to meet him.”

He tries to smile, but he’s not sure he manages it. He doesn’t correct her, doesn’t tell her Steve was already here, doesn’t explain. “Well,” he begins, “I guess I’ll just have to meet him another time.”

This is the last time he’ll see Peggy, he knows. He only wishes she would know, too.

_—_

At five o’clock exactly, Andra comes to get him. His hair has been cut, like she suggested, sheared unevenly but not poorly enough for it to be something to stare at, he hopes. His photostatic veil is already in place. It’s uncomfortable; the thin material makes it feel like there’s thousands of small _somethings_ crawling on his face. But it wasn't made for comfort—it was made for utility. And there’s no denying that it’s working. The face he wears is broad-nosed with high cheekbones and dark eyes. It looks nothing like him. It's modifying his voice too. It sounds higher, lighter.  
  
Andra leads him to the staff parking lot, which is mostly empty. The black SUV is still parked there, as well as a handful of unremarkable sedans and a motorcycle. A group of agents are clustered under a cordoned-off canopy set up at the nearest corner of the lot—presumably their base of operations while the investigation— _his_ investigation—is underway. It would have been too much to hope that they would drop this. He murdered three of their agents, after all. But at least they’re not looking for him, specifically. Thanks to Andra, they’re looking for someone impersonating him. White male, long brown hair, 6’0”. Could be anyone.  
  
“Agents,” Andra says in greeting once they get close enough. They all nod at her.  
  
It’s then that he notices the man sitting on a foldable chair, his body too big to comfortably sit on the plastic seat. He’s folded in on himself, as though trying to make himself smaller, but he stands as they approach, and _God_ , there is nothing he could have done to prepare himself for this.  
  
“Steve,” he says. He doesn’t think, just speaks. It’s not even his voice—the photostatic veil has a voice modulator, and the words that leave his tongue sounds like the imposter he’s pretending to be. But the veil can't obscure his tone: the surprise he’s sure Steve expects, the desperate lilt he’s sure he doesn’t. He’s frozen in the parking lot wearing a stranger’s face and staring at Steve’s like it’s the only face he knows. At one point, it was.  
  
Seeing him hurts more than he anticipated it would. Steve is wearing a sweatshirt—grey, casual, comfortable. His hair seems darker than he remembered. It's still gold, still Steve’s shade of blond, but not quite as vibrant, not quite as bright. His eyes are the same, though. They’re so blue he thinks the sky’s color needs another name.  
  
“Steve,” Andra says, covering for him. “Still waiting for updates?”  
  
“Yeah,” Steve says. “Are you heading out?”  
  
“I am,” Andra is saying. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon. I’m giving my coworker Alex here a ride home and then I’m going to sleep for a couple hours. Just need some rest.”  
  
“That’s good—rest is important,” Steve says. He seems off, distracted. “Alex, is it? It’s nice to meet you.”  
  
Steve extends his hand. He takes it. The second of contact makes him think about how the last time he touched this hand, he was pulling Steve from the Potomac.  
  
“It’s nice to meet you too,” he finds himself saying.  
  
“We have to go,” Andra says. “Alex has a family to get back to. Right Alex?”  
  
He’s still looking at Steve. He can’t stop staring. His heart is pounding in his chest, so hard it hurts.  
  
“Yeah,” he manages. He forces himself to blink, to wrench his gaze away and look at Andra instead. “Let’s go.”  
  
They start walking towards her car. He tries not to look back but he does, once. Steve is watching them go, and their eyes lock, just for a moment. It’s enough that he thinks he might have turned to salt if Andra’s arm hadn’t touched his, lightly, gently, and pulled him back from the edge.  
  
He looks away. Andra unlocks the car. He opens the passenger-side door. He sits down and closes the door behind him. Andra starts the car. They leave the parking lot. Behind them, the nursing home, the place he’s lived for the last seven months, grows smaller and smaller until they turn a corner and then it’s gone, out of sight.  
  
“Are you okay?” Andra asks. He lets out a breath.  
  
“I will be,” he tells her. “In a little while.”  
  
In a little while.  
  
He’ll see Steve again, he tells himself. Not today, not this month, perhaps not this year. But he will see him again. He knows it as sure as breathing, as sure as the sun rises and sets.  
  
“Yeah,” he says, more quietly now. “I’ll be okay.”


	6. Epilogue

_Eighteen Months Later_

_—_

He accepts what he knows is about to happen with a quiet sort of resignation. The moment he read the headline at the newspaper stand, he knows. He’ll have to leave—again. He’s a fugitive. He’s been expecting this. He can handle it.  
  
He walks quickly back to his apartment. He doesn’t run—that would attract too much attention. The bag of plums swings at his side and his feet graze the edges of the puddles on the uneven sidewalk as he walks towards what he knows is going to be a fight.   
  
There are things in his apartment he has to get. He has a bag of emergency supplies ready for situations like this. His notebook is inside that bag.   
  
He turns a corner, and his apartment building looms ahead. He sees no vans nearby, no loitering men in suits, nothing that would alert him that he’s been found. If he hadn’t seen his face in that newspaper, he might have thought he was safe. Now he knows that the reason it doesn’t seem like anyone is there is because that’s how they want it to seem. His enemies sent professionals to deal with him, people who know what they’re doing. People who know how to stay hidden.   
  
He makes no effort to be discrete. He walks straight to the front entrance of his apartment building and unlocks the door. He takes two steps at a time up the stairs, feeling his breath quicken, his muscles tense. His legs begin to burn protest and his heart starts to race as he keeps climbing, climbing, climbing. Eighth floor, ninth floor, tenth floor....   
  
At the landing after the eleventh floor, something seems to shift in the air around him, and he _knows_.   
  
He knows when he climbs the last flight of stairs, quickly, silently, approaching the open door of his apartment that had been locked when he left.   
  
He knows when he steps onto the landing and rounds his open door, setting his groceries on his doorstep.   
  
He knows when he steps into the shadows of his apartment, careful not to make a sound.   
  
He knows when he sees him.   
  
Steve is standing in front of the refrigerator. He’s wearing his uniform, though it’s a different one than the last one he saw him in. His head is bent down, and his shoulders and low, and he’s holding the notebook—the first notebook, the one Peggy gave to him. Steve cradles it like he’s holding a part of Bucky’s soul which, he supposes, he might be. It’s fitting, for it to be back in Steve’s hands after all this time. It feels like some sort of cosmic cycle has been completed, like everything is finally falling into place.   
  
He waits. It takes only a second or two. Someone says something into Steve’s comms and he murmurs something quiet under his breath. Then he turns, slow.   
  
Steve stares at him. He stares like he’s trying to keep the expectations from his eyes but he can’t. The room is quiet, but he knows what’s coming for them. There’s a fight on the horizon. He thinks they always exist here, in this strange, static interim, waiting for the next battle.   
  
“Do you know me?” Steve asks. Casual. Supposed to be casual. It’s a far throw from that.   
  
The answer is yes. Yes, a thousand ways. Yes, when you were small, eleven years old with nothing but a too-big shirt and a death wish. Yes, when you were sixteen and you got beat to hell because the kids in the alley were throwing rocks at a stray tabby, and you didn’t know how to walk away from a fight. Yes, when you were twenty-one and you almost died of pneumonia. Yes, when you were in the army and I thought I might die if you left this world first.   
  
“You’re Steve,” Bucky says instead. “I read about you in a museum.”   
  
It’s true. But there’s so much more. If he survives this, Bucky thinks, he’ll get to share it. 

—

 _End._


End file.
